


Master of Her Domain

by OutRes



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Flirting, Ball Sucking, Consentacles, Dream Sex, Eventual Kylo Ren/Rey, Exhibitionism, Explicit Consent, F/M, First Time, Fishing, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Visions, French Kissing, Hiking Porn, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Kylo Ren Redemption, Lactation, Large Cock, M/M, Masturbation, Minor Character Death, Minor Injuries, Multi, Nudism, Oral Sex, Pain, Planet of the Sex, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Psychological Warfare, Squirting, The Force, Threesome - F/M/M, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, Water Sex, Wet Dream, Wetting, Xenophilia, a real menagerie of tags i know, ass licking, big cats, period mention, sexual awakening
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:34:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 25,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25210024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OutRes/pseuds/OutRes
Summary: Rey, suddenly isolated from her friends and the rest of the galaxy, finds enlightenment in an unexpected way.
Relationships: Finn/Rey (Star Wars), Poe Dameron/Finn, Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	1. The Field

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Writer's Note: Ch. 1-4 are largely table-setting, things start getting spicy from Ch. 5 onward)

In the beginning, Rey’s world was one of darkness. And pain. Yes, _definitely_ pain.

Second-by-second, a new reality began to creep in, filling the inlets of her shell-shocked consciousness.

She was Rey. That was her name. Scavenger girl. No, that didn’t seem right. Jedi? Better, but still not quite.

She was… 

The answer laid on the tip of her tongue.

And under the tips of her fingers.

The young woman’s eyes creaked open, bloodshot from trauma.

Rey saw an open, cloudless sky, its blue tinged with a dreamy pink haze that evoked danger, somehow.

The answer finally came, terrifying and in bulk.

She was lying in a field. On Ittezna 441-B. The Lonely Planet. She was supposed to be leaving, with the others, but she’d hadn’t.

Rey couldn’t remember why.

But she did smell something; it took a moment, perhaps too long of one, to recall what the idea of a _smell_ was, how she could perceive them. But perceive she did.

It was one of ruin, acrid in its comportment.

Rey tried to sit up, and failed. Too much of her hurt, and worse, too much of her she just _couldn’t feel_.

But something inside the singed not-a-scavenger-maybe-a-Jedi encouraged her to try again. And again. And again.

A minute passed. Two. Ten.

Rey’s abraded lips turned upwards. She had made progress. 

Oh, she hadn’t moved significantly. She was in terrible pain. But she was a _lot_ less numb.

She flexed her fingers in the fine dirt, churning it around. Raised one arm to the sky, then the other, the pain in her joints severe but, thankfully, not disabling. Not for the first time, she was thankful for her protective bracer and armwraps, worn near-constantly.

She let her arms fall… and nearly passed out from the jolt of their impact to the ground.

Rey grimaced. Baby steps.

She attempted the same exercise with her legs, raising - with difficulty - a clothed knee to her chest, then a booted foot to the sky. She repeated it with her other leg, to similar success, being extra careful in depositing both to the ground afterwards.

Rey blew out a breath, her face glazed with exertion. _Force_ , her tailbone hurt. 

Time for the fun part.

She shifted her weight to her right side - it hurt _slightly_ less than her left - and, pulling from a growing reserve of energy, quickly flipped onto her stomach.

The resulting cry echoed across the clearing. 

Rey awoke a few minutes later, coughing from the bad air, and tasting dirt. Why was she tasting dirt? _Oh, right_.

Grimly, she also realized that her pants and the lower front of her gray tunic-tabard were now _very_ damp as well, and not from anything on the ground below her. She’d have to grab a change of clothes when she got back to the Falcon.

_The Falcon._

With more resolve than she honestly could have imagined summoning in her current condition, Rey balled her hands into fists and began pushing herself up from the ground with her arms.

The pain was incredible. Rey, eyebrows set in a deep furrow and teeth fully-bared, didn’t care, couldn’t care.

Next were her legs, which she shakily ratcheted forward, knees dragging the moist dirt forward with them. Now on all fours, Rey had to take a moment. She, in her half-chuckling, half-sobbing state, had regained partial mobility, but her back was still practically on fire.

Oh, well.

Inch-by-inch, Rey crawled forward amidst the dirt and the reeds. Ever-cognizant of her injured back, she kept her pace slow. The young woman didn’t know where she was headed in this - from her limited perspective - endless field, only that she _needed_ to move. The thickening smoke only compounded this desire.

A half-hour passed. Rey could feel the pebbles stuck in her armwraps, the new tears in her pants at the knees. She stopped, coughing and sodden in sweat. _What was she even doing?_

A sharp, echo-y pop of an explosion just ahead cleared her doubt.

Rey double-timed it - as much as she could, anyway - and soon cleared the foliage.

But as she did, her right hand met nothingness, and she screamed.

The sudden shock to her already-fragile equilibrium prevented Rey from catching herself as she fell into the yawning chasm. Her legs scrabbled for any sort of hold to keep herself from going over, but to no avail. 

She simply fell.


	2. The Falcon

The next time Rey awoke, she was in Hell.

It was an old Jakkuan myth, half-remembered by her dazed mind; a fiery place where all your salvage is utterly worthless, where the water in your canteen turns to dust on your tongue, and where all your friends turn on you in hope of finding escape.

But as the smouldering image in her semi-encrusted eyes gained definition, it became clear this was  _ not  _ Hell, but something different. And arguably worse.

The Millennium Falcon was dead. 

It was the word that had first occurred to Rey, and so suffused her with grief. For she instinctively knew her hopes were dead with it. 

The pain of it, seeing the burning ship a few dozen yards away in the deep gully, its dying engines eating the spaceframe away from the inside-out, was worse than the pain of all the cuts and bruises she’d suffered in her bouncing roll down the steep slope. Worse than her throbbing spine and ribs. Worse than the searing, foreboding twinge in her left arm.

There, supine in the mud, Rey weeped as she remembered.

***************

Leia had sent them on a retrieve-and-return mission. Eight cases of small arms and detonators, hidden on 441-B six years before the Battle of Yavin by a Rebel general who believed the war would run longer than his lifetime. After all, the planet was only accessible every forty years; the rest of the time, it was surrounded by a starship-blocking nebula.

The cache’s location had been filed away in the deep archives, and had been pulled by Leia as she looked for resources for her burgeoning Resistance. She initially disregarded the trip, seeing the only-two-hour-long window to get in and out as too big a risk for whoever she’d send.

But her opinion had changed after D’Qar. 

The frenzied evacuation of the base, plus the loss of most of her forces in the subsequent chase and standoff on Crait, meant that  _ all  _ the stops had to be pulled out in getting the Resistance back to full strength.

That meant retrieving the cache on the Lonely Planet, which was  _ just  _ about to restart its forty-year cycle. The General sent Rey, Nien Nunb, and a handful of support crew there on the Resistance’s fastest ship. They’d arrived, burned through the weakened nebula with shields on full, and landed with no difficulty to speak of. There was no issue finding the cache, its beacon still-functioning even after all this time. The crew - with some Force-powered assistance from Rey - promptly loaded the crates up into the Falcon, and back up they went.

Except they hadn’t.

***************

Rey had drawn herself into a sitting position, absent-mindedly converting one of her armwraps into a makeshift sling as she looked on at the corpse of the Falcon. Her face was an expressionless mask as she tried to make sense of it all.

_ What had happened? _

She remembered sitting in the pilot’s seat as the ship lifted off. She remembered sparing a quick smirk for Nunb, her copilot on the mission, as he quipped about not being able to stay longer to “enjoy the sights.” And then… nothing. Just the field.

Another pop from the wreckage interrupted her train of thought, but had the benefit of refocusing Rey’s attention to the here and now. 

“Okay,” she hoarsely muttered to herself. 

_ Okay. _

As much as she hated to, it was time to start thinking like a scavenger again.

First priority was finding Nunb and the others. After all, if Rey had survived… they might have too. But as the Force user calmed herself and reached out with her perceptions, like Luke had taught her to on Ahch-To, she felt… nothing. Oh, there was  _ definitely  _ life here - the small planet was practically teeming with it - but everything Rey felt was unfamiliar. Alien. If her compatriots were here…

Rey shivered at the implication. 

The other problem was that of supplies. Not much could have survived the crash, and what was left was currently being consumed by the fire. As for weapons, Rey hadn’t brought the cloven pieces of Luke’s saber with her to work on, but she still felt something inexorably tied to her somewhere deep within the hulk.

She focused even more, until her eyes widened in recognition. 

Her quarterstaff.

But it wouldn’t survive long, not in that heat. She’d have to get it, quickly.

Rey looked down at her bruised legs, her grey pants now so ripped and torn that they partially dangled in pieces from where they were tucked into her boots. 

She certainly wasn’t walking, not quite yet. Which left one option.

The young woman took a long stare at the wreck, etching the painful sight into her mind. She closed her eyes.

Rey’s mindscape was clouded with pangs of worry, fear, and literal pain. With great effort, she pushed it all aside, to focus on just one singular object. 

She pictured the quarterstaff, its ends, the notched contours of its steel length. She remembered all that she’d done with it, from its use as an essential scavenging tool and weapon on Jakku, to her training with it on the seaside cliffs of Ahch-To. And, most importantly, she recognized how much of herself, her experiences as a person, a scavenger, a Jedi, were forever imprinted upon the staff, making it  _ truly  _ hers.

She was one with her staff. And in her mind’s eye, she saw it, lodged beneath a scorched bulkhead.

Rey didn’t question the sight, how exactly she knew; she merely reached out, lightly prodding the weapon with her senses.

The staff trembled, slightly.

The Force user strengthened her connection, increasing her focus and perception of the staff and its environs until she could nearly discern a tether, suspended between it and herself.

With a great burst of mental energy, she  _ pulled _ .

The staff nearly rocketed out of its crevice, and flew through collapsed conduits and mangled corridors. So deep in concentration was Rey that she barely noticed the weapon soaring out of the ship’s busted port airlock. At great velocity.

Right at her.

“Shit!”

The young Jedi rolled to her side, hissing in pain as she did, just as her staff deposited itself in the mud with a thunderous *ker-plunk*. Right where she’d been sitting.

Rey sighed. Just one more close call, in a day filled with them.

***************

Like its owner, the staff hadn’t escaped the crash unscathed. The shoulder strap had been completely burned away, leaving the empty buckles clanging against the dark metal. The same was true of the cloth and leather grips Rey had used in wielding it. But otherwise, the staff was intact, if a bit warm to the touch.

She had managed, albeit painfully, to use the implement to slowly prop herself up into a standing position. Now, clutching the staff for dear life with her good arm, she watched the last fires in the wreck sputter into insignificance, leaving the Falcon a sparking, melted pastiche of its former self.

The young woman gulped. Here came the tough part.

She looked down at her booted feet, half-ensconced in mud. Marshaling all the reserves she had, Rey willed one forward, fighting for traction on the slippery surface. The shift in weight set her pelvis aflame, but she fought through it, stabbing the staff into the ground ahead of her in preparation for the next step.

And the next. And the next.

It wasn’t long until Rey stood mere feet away from what used to be the Falcon’s starboard landing ramp, now an opening into gloomy desolation. The pain had lessened to a dull roar, allowing her to use the staff as more of a walking stick than an essential crutch. She hobbled cautiously up the ramp to the inner airlock door, already half-open. Likely due to the crash, she supposed.

Rey pondered ducking down to clear it, but decided to spare her aching back and merely used the Force to retract it further upwards along its track into bulkhead. The warped metal screeched as it moved; Rey stopped, but not at the sound. No, she was surprised at how easily  _ instinctive  _ her use of the Force had become, even in the utter calamity of her current situation.

Had she really become so adept? Or was it something  _ else _ ? She shook her head, clearing her thoughts. These were questions for later. Much later.

The door had risen enough to let her pass without much discomfort, but Rey remained at the threshold, peering into the darkness. She wished for a flashlight. She wished to not have to confirm what she, deep down, already knew.

The air was dank with traces of smoke and ozone. Instead of the deep, composing breath she would have taken, Rey locked her jaw in a purposeful scowl and moved inside. Now in near-total darkness, she found herself feeling out the rounded corridor ahead with her staff, moving aside bits of debris as she went. 

She didn’t have to move sightless for long, however. Though Rey could have figured that she’d reached the ship’s cargo hold by the way the path opened up, she didn’t need to. There was light in there, a great split in the hull above letting the midday sun in. 

But as her eyes drifted down from the light to settle on the room itself, she instantly regretted her brief comfort in being able to see.

She had found the support crew.

Rey struggled to maintain her composure as she looked upon the five bodies, scattered around the bay and burned beyond recognition. She couldn’t tell which one was Allie, the infantry soldier who had been training to be a pilot. Nor Juun, the Mythol fuel chemist. Nor even Ibdun Dand or his son Vobor. The only one she could identify for certain was the diminutive form of Yipsit, the Shahkirin mechanic. 

She hadn’t been much more than passing acquaintances with any of them, but they’d  _ all  _ been friendly, good souls. And now they were dead.

Rey fought off the overbearing desire to rest her head against the doorway in grief. She had one more compatriot to find. Backing up a step, she broke off the main corridor and traveled down a side passage to what she knew to be the Falcon’s cockpit. The hatch was closed; it was a sometimes-enabled inflight safety feature of the freighter. For all the good it did now.

Unlike with the ship’s entryway, Rey didn’t even need to use the Force to open this door, its seals still intact and demagnetized. But as she slid it aside, her grip on it tightened so hard and Forcefully that it dented the metal. 

Nien.

Besides a significant rent in the canopy where - Rey assumed - she’d been ejected from the ship, the cockpit was largely intact, if somewhat soot-stained. This made it all the worse for her in seeing the  _ very  _ recognizable Sullustan, slumped forward and motionless against the ship’s controls in his co-pilot’s seat. 

This time, Rey freely gave into her sorrow.


	3. The Apparition

Rey wandered the Falcon for an hour, her scavenging instincts leading her to every nook and cranny in the wrecked ship. But, as she had predicted, there was little to find; outside of the cockpit, the fire had spared little. 

Now she stood, back in the main corridor, illuminating the darkness with a palm light found under the pilot’s seat. She went over her loot, laid out on the deck below. Her food supply? A few ration capsules she’d already had on her belt, plus two more she had found on Nien. Tools? The light, some simple metal implements that had survived the inferno, and a miniature hydrospanner, also pilfered from the Sullustan’s corpse. 

Rey pursed her lips in obvious disgust. She _hated_ having to pillage her friend like a common carrion bird, but it was do or die. But, the way things were looking, the latter outcome seemed more inevitable by the minute. All the survival supplies had been destroyed. The ship’s communication’s suite was beyond repair, and she’d already discerned that the cockpit’s emergency transponder wouldn’t be able to penetrate the radiation field. She’d set it to active repeat anyway.

So that left a week’s worth of food that she could  _ probably  _ stretch into two, and a handful of tools made to work with technology that didn’t exist on this planet. And her palm light.  _ And _ her quarterstaff. The idea had occurred to her of stripping Nien’s corpse and using his clothes for extra cloth and fuel, but in the end, Rey wanted her friend to maintain at least  _ some  _ kind of dignity in his sorry death. 

She did take his boots, though.

One-two weeks of food. Useless tools. Palm light with a few hours’ power. Extra (albeit ill-fitting) boots. Staff. 

Rey sighed, mussing her still-bound hair in frustration. She had definitely contended with worse on Jakku, but in all those other instances where she’d suddenly had to focus on survival, she’d at least had a clear goal, a  _ home  _ to return to.  _ Parents  _ to see again, even as misguided as that particular hope ended up being.

Here, she had… what, exactly?

The girl’s face crumpled as reality became to set in. She was, plainly,  _ stuck  _ on this planet for forty years. At least. The next time the radiation weakened,  _ if _ she survived, she’d be as old as General Leia. But that fact didn’t incense her as much as the idea that she was, for all intents and purposes, out of the fight against Kylo Ren and the First Order. 

She didn’t want to discount the fighting ability of the Resistance, of Poe and Finn and Rose, and all the others. But she knew that, without a Jedi - or Jedi-in-training, anyway - Leia would be hard-pressed to combat the overwhelming force that had practically taken control of most inhabited systems. Even Luke’s now-legendary last stand on Crait could only stoke the flames of resistance for so long. 

In forty years, her friends might all be dead.

Rey, fresh tears streaming down her face, struck the wall with her fist, using the pain to fuel a familiar anger. 

Yes, she’d never see her friends again. She’d die, forgotten, an old crone on a hidden planet.

_ Alone _ .

“Rey.”

The girl went stock-still at the voice. Slowly inched around to face its source.

Luke Skywalker, clad in the robes in which she’d first seen him all those weeks ago on Ahch-to, stood in the entryway. Glowing.

Rey, aghast: “Master Skywalker!”

She hurriedly wiped the tears from her face, sputtering. “What… what are you doing here?”

Luke put his ghostly hands on his ghostly hips. “I’m here to  _ help  _ you, Rey.”

Hope surged like a geyser inside her. “You’ve got a way off the planet! How? Where? I mean-”

The Jedi Master silenced her with a half-raised hand. The look on his face betrayed a sweet sadness that froze the geyser rock-solid.

“You can’t escape this place right now, Rey.” He looked up, eyes wistfully traveling the length of his old friend’s ship. “At least... not in the way you’re thinking.”

Rey hovered between puzzlement and irritation at Luke’s vagueness. “Then,  _ how?” _

He strode, footsteps unheard upon the melted plating, into the cargo hold. Silently took stock of the bodies still littered about the room. “When I was in exile on Ahch-to, I was never truly alone. I had the Caretakers, yes…” Rey frowned at the memory of the fastidious creatures. “...but, from time to time, I was visited by those Jedi who had come before me.” He let Rey connect the dots. “You mean, their spirits.” Luke nodded. “Yes. Even though I had closed myself off from the Force in grief over Ben’s betrayal, I wasn’t completely deafened to its currents.” 

He gazed at the light streaming in from the ceiling, reflecting. 

“Though I certainly wished I had been.”

Rey had limped to his side, fighting off a slight sense of vertigo from Luke’s transparent state. He continued: “They imparted great wisdom about the Force, about being a Jedi. But I wasn’t willing to listen. I pushed myself farther and farther into my isolation, and eventually…” 

“They stopped,” Rey finished. 

The ethereal figure nodded again. “That they did. And I was not visited again until, well…”

Luke spared a sly glance at Rey. “The night you left, to try and bring Ben back to the light.” The girl winced at how she’d come  _ so close  _ to bringing Han and Leia’s son back from the precipice of evil, only for him to willfully jump off its edge. “It was the oldest and wisest of my masters. He conveyed  _ crucial  _ knowledge, knowledge that helped me save you all on Crait.”

“And helped me move on.”

Rey felt a pang of guilt and sorrow at Luke’s fate. But she believed she was beginning to grasp Luke’s purpose in relating this anecdote to her.

She stepped in front of the apparition, turning her back on the corpses of her comrades. Leveled expectant eyes at her former master. “You’re here to help me… pass on. Become a part of the Force, like you have.”

Luke guffawed.

“Well, that’s a long way off.” 

The girl blushed in embarrassment. But Luke wasn’t finished.

“Rey, you  _ are  _ wise beyond your years, but you told me yourself that you’re still searching for your role in everything. Or has that changed since we last spoke?”

Her features hardened into resolve. “My  _ role  _ is to help my friends. To  _ fight  _ with the Resistance.” 

The old Jedi cut her off, his voice taking on an acerbic quality. “To defeat Kylo Ren, and save the galaxy. Yes, I know.”

Rey bit back, eyes watering. “ _ Is it wrong? _ Is it wrong to do all you can for those you love?”

Luke regarded her for a moment, then merely said, “No.”

“But my father once asked that very same question of himself, and his choices from that point onwards led him down a path fraught with more pain and sadness than he ever could have imagined.”

Vader. Rey knew of Luke’s father, of course, even used his storied redemption to try to convince Luke to teach her back on Ahch-To. But she never exactly learned  _ how  _ he became Darth Vader.

She shook her head. It was a question for later.

Luke, too, seemed eager to move on. “Rey, I’m here to help you become  _ a better Jedi _ . To complete your training.”

“But Kylo Ren, the First Order-”

Luke raised his hands in an indication of temperance. “Will be fought. And defeated, eventually.”

The girl stared in disbelief. How could he know for certain?

“Rey, you don’t realize it, but your being here confounds the enemy’s plans to a remarkable degree.”

Her face wordlessly conveyed a single - and she knew, unanswerable - question:  _ How? _

“But  _ he _ knows that too. That is why you need to prepare for what is coming.”

Rey was nearly out of patience with the apparition’s vague inferences. She had the here-and-now to contend with. “What I need to _prepare_ for is the fact I have two weeks of food and no shelter.” After all, the Falcon, rank with corpses and leaking hyperdrive coolant, was no place to live.

She returned to her hoard, began stuffing the food capsules and the tools into the extra pair of boots. The ghost of Skywalker was unperturbed at her impudence. Mostly. 

“ _ Patience _ , Rey.” The girl scoffed in return.

Luke raised a twinkly eyebrow. “Or should I refrain from telling you that this planet is not nearly as uninhabitable as you believe?”

_ This  _ caught her attention. She paused to listen, staring at the blackened deck.

“I know you didn’t have much time to translate the texts from Ahch-To, but if you’d continued, you would have learned that this planet is known to the Jedi. It’s a veritable nexus in the Force.”

Of course.  _ That’s  _ why she was able to use her powers so effectively,

“The Ancient Jedi used to come here on meditative retreats. They found the land bounteous, and the hazards relatively few.”

At this, Rey finally looked up, incredulous. “ _ Forty-year _ retreats? How long did these Jedi live for?”

Luke chuckled at the girl’s question. “A long time. And even longer than that, once they returned.”

Acceptance growing of her new reality, Rey’s anger was ebbing, but she was still frustrated. “It still doesn’t feel right. A ‘meditative retreat’ while the galaxy burns? While people die?”

Luke knelt down to her level, his eyes betraying a deep empathy. “It’s natural to feel that way, Rey.” She sighed, a bit of the great weight that she’d felt since all this began lifting away. “And it’s natural to think of your friends, too. Let your thoughts of them drive you,  _ focus  _ you for the challenges ahead.”

Rey slowly nodded in acknowledgement. She wouldn’t forget them. Ever.

But thoughts alone weren’t enough to keep her company. Hesitating, she said, “It’s just… even on Jakku, there were the other scavengers at Niima Outpost.” Even as much she outright  _ hated  _ some of them, but she left that part out. “Here…”

Luke picked up on her meaning. “I’ll _ always  _ be with you.” He added, in a somewhat-self-conscious tone, “Perhaps more in… spirit, than a physical presence like this, but that’s the Force for you.”

Rey rolled her eyes, but understood nevertheless. She definitely knew how fickle the Force could end up being. 

“And, of course, Leia knows about all this.”

Rey froze. A small, pensive voice asked, “She does?”

Luke smiled. “She does. Your bond with her is stronger than you know. She’ll help where she can.”

That frozen geyser inside Rey began to melt, slightly. If Leia knew, so did her friends. She returned the smile, then returned to packing her supplies.

Matter-of-factly, she added, “So what do you know about this planet, anyway?”

A definite lack of an answer made her look up again. 

Luke was gone.

Rey silently cursed in the renewed darkness. Fickle, indeed.

More tired than angry, she let a closed fist drop to the deck. The distinct impact reverberated across what remained of the deck plates. There was an... odd sound to it, she half-consciously realized, like…

Like there was a hollow space below them.

Rey gasped in realization, scurrying to the edge of the corridor and muttering even more curses to herself as she did.

Han had offhandedly told her about these shielded smuggling compartments, their former use of hiding cargo and sometimes even people from the Empire. Leia had planned to make use of them for the Resistance, but they hadn’t yet gotten the chance after Crait. 

To her knowledge, Unkar Plutt hadn’t opened - or even found - them when the Falcon had been in his possession; Rey knew he would have been boasting about them to the no-account scavengers for days on end if he had.

As far as she was concerned, there was a galaxy’s worth of possibilities as to what they held now.

With her good arm, she felt around the edges of the charred plate where it met the spaceframe. There was a rubbery seal of some sort, clearly undamaged by the fire. She dug into it with her fingers, looking for enough of a space to lift the panel. Her effort was soon rewarded by a hiss of escaping air and a deep *clank* resounding below the floor.

Rey’s bicep visibly flexed as she single-handedly pried the plate off the floor and cast it aside. She shined her light below, expecting a true smuggler’s hoard.

There was nothing.

Rey’s jaw worked furiously for a moment as she tried to restrain her frustration, but then relaxed as she subsequently remembered that there were  _ two  _ compartments.

She edged along the sides of the corridor to the next portion of deck plate, but found no seal with her fingers, just hard bulkhead. Under her breath, she muttered a terse “Come on…” as she moved to the next one, knocking on it as she did.

Oh, that blessed hollow sound. 

Rey practically tore this plate away from the floor, it clattering away as she did.

Empty. 

_ Except _ for a small canvas backpack in one of the nook’s corners.

Heart pounding, Rey carefully lowered herself into the compartment. Just one or two ration bars, energy cells,  _ anything _ , could make a huge difference. She reached for the bag, felt its significant heft. 

Crouching down, she unzipped the backpack and peered inside.

An already-opened medkit, its contents strewn within the bag.

And a half-full bottle of Corellian ale.

Rey let go of the bag, let herself slowly sink to the floor of the small space. 

She smiled.

Now,  _ this  _ was more like it.

Spirits significantly raised, Rey hopped up out of the pit with her newfound treasure, and proceeded to stuff all the supplies she’d already found inside it. 

In doing so, her eyes caught on the bodies of the Resistance crew, still cooling in the low-lit hold. She winced. It didn’t feel honorable just… leaving them out like that. But burying them outside seemed a little beyond her capabilities in her current state.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a small fixture on the wall - a burned-out light, Rey supposed - popping free of its damaged mount and falling right to the floor. Right into one of the compartments. 

The girl’s gaze lingered on it for a second, then forlornly moved back to the battered hold. 

It was better than nothing. 


	4. The Preparation

Moving the bodies with one hand was not an easy task; the sheer morbidity of it fazing Rey enough to prevent her from simply moving them with the Force. 

By the time she’d dragged Nien to the now-filled compartment, the ship was almost back to total darkness, its sole light source - as Rey had turned off the palm light to conserve batteries - having drawn lower in the hazy sky. The lack of light did not prevent her from depositing the prone Sullustan atop the pile of her former comrades, nor did it stop her from placing the deck plating back atop the improvised mass grave.

But she did need a little light for what came next.

One-by-one, Rey carved their names into the panel using Nien’s hydrospanner. As she did, tears began gathering in her eyes, resisting the rapid blinking made in effort to drive them away. 

They hadn’t deserved this.

But as the young woman etched a crude approximation of the Resistance firebird below the unfortunate list, she realized that while she could  _ never  _ make it up to them, she could at least remember them and all they fought for. She’d use those thoughts to drive herself amidst whatever awaited her here, like Luke had suggested.

Rey stood, staring at the makeshift grave. They would be with her, and she with them, always.

Walking down the ramp of the Falcon for the last time, staff in hand and backpack full of essentials slung over her shoulder, Rey looked up again to the sky, ever darkening in the twilight.

The lingering rays of the sun tangled with the pink haze of the nebula, highlighting its contours amid the atmosphere. To Rey, it looked like the sky was now a great organism, veins pulsing with color and life, like the world below and above it . 

She was stuck here. She accepted that. 

But as Rey gazed upwards at the enthralling celestial performance, she realized something  _ crucial _ . Something Luke had been hinting at throughout their conversation.

Stuck... was a relative term.

***************

Not especially eager to scale the steep hill around the Falcon in darkness, Rey settled down for the night, next to a fallen log a short distance away in the gully. She frowned as she felt the cool mud beneath her, and the sensation forced her to truly regard herself for the first time since she crashed.

Simply put, Rey was a  _ mess _ .

Her gray pants and remaining armwrap were torn severely; the limbs beneath visibly covered in scratches and mud. The thin, gauze-like wrap that adorned her shoulders and chest was practically shredded from the rocks and debris. Only her boots, belt, leather bracer, and the thick black Jedi tunic she wore remained undamaged, if a bit dirty. 

She needed to make finding a fresh-water stream or a pond her top priority; Rey knew from years of experience that dirt and wounds did  _ not  _ mix well.

But she  _ did  _ have a temporary solution.

First, Rey outright declared the pants a loss, tearing the fabric even further and pulling the remains out of her boots so that they more resembled her calf-baring scavenging leggings from Jakku, if a bit more tattered and exposing of her knees. She repeated the motion with her body wrap, loosening her belt slightly so she could pull the ruined rags away to join the growing pile of extra cloth next to her. The armwrap, too, joined the bundle.

Rey then proceeded to stuff it all in the pack - but not before pulling out the bottle of ale and palm light, which she switched on.

She held the small light up to the bottle’s stylish label, squinting to read the alcohol content.

Her eyes widened. Yeah, that’d do.

Rey unscrewed the cap, barely noticing the heady aroma that drifted out. Her sun-freckled arms and legs now bared, it was only a  _ slightly _ -precarious matter of dribbling the drink onto her many scrapes without using too much of it. After all, she wryly noted, this was supposed to last her forty years, since the sanitization spray in the medpack had been all but used.

The young woman’s arm trembled as the cleansing liquid made contact, hissing and bubbling against the wounds. She steadied herself. It hurt, but compared to the day’s trials, minimally-so. Still, as the sanitizing sting began to sweep her scored body, she began to wish she’d at least taken a swig of the potent ale.

Rey covered as many of the scrapes as she could, then recapped the bottle and put it, along with the palm light, back in the now-quite-plump canvas bag. 

By this point, the sun was only a dim afterimage on the horizon, the only real light now being cast by the stars and the nebula. Rey leaned back against the log, looking up at the night sky. This was one of her favorite pastimes in her solitary life on Jakku, just staring and imagining the intricacies of each and every star. Visualizing a  _ better  _ life for herself.

“Fat lot of good it did me,” she muttered sarcastically.

But she had to grant that things  _ had  _ changed. She’d met Finn, then Han and Chewie. Leia, Poe, Rose, all of them. Actual friends, who cared about her, and who were most definitely thinking of her at that very moment.

It was a small solace to Rey as, head now buried under sharp-smelling arms and pulled-up knees, she willfully surrendered herself to the inevitable pull of sleep.

***************

Sore. Sore. Sore.

It was all Rey could perceive as she awoke the next morning. Well, mostly.

Her stomach was growling too.

Rey groaned as she sat up - having curled into a ball on the ground at some point during the night - and numbly reached for the bag, first seeking a non-existent canteen of water. Failing that, she pulled a ration capsule from one of the pockets.

She twisted off the plastiform cover, studying the artificially-shaped contents carefully. Her eyes reflexively made invisible notches for each day’s consumption. She ate about a fingernail’s length and stowed the capsule away in her bag.

The ache in her belly subsided, but she knew that this, too, wasn’t sustainable. Memories of prolonged rationing back on Jakku, of her body becoming frail and thin, flooded back to Rey. No, she had to find another solution for this planet, not to mention drinkable water.

“Yet more problems to solve...” she mumbled to herself as she stood up from her resting place - and winced, at a few things.

First, her talking to herself; she really didn’t want to become like the old crones back on Jakku, muttering inanities while scrubbing the dirt off their salvage. But she also had to find  _ some  _ way to maintain her sanity while on 441-B, and voicing her thoughts out loud seemed as harmless a way as any.

“I’m just talking to Luke,” resolved Rey. “Yes.”

A recurring, pressuring throb in her bladder and bowels cut her monologue off. Here was the second issue. But in glancing around at all of nature, abundant in nooks and crannies and  _ quite  _ devoid of sentient creatures, Rey found an easy solution.

A number of minutes later, the young woman returned to the log, more than a little relieved. This repose lessened as she took stock of the steep hills around her. Hills that she needed to climb if she wanted to get out of here.

Rey glanced down at her right arm, still in traction at her side. She could tell by the bruising, the unnatural and painful stiffness, that its healing was a  _ long  _ way off. So, how was she going to, how  _ could  _ she climb?

The answer came on the morning breeze.

Its easy-going wisp against her bare arms and legs led Rey to ask herself, “Wait, how high is that?” Her keen senses told her it was roughly fifty meters. 

But she knew, deep down, that the height itself was meaningless.

Rey blew out a breath. She had never, at least not consciously, lept using the Force. The closest she’d come was her dizzying sprint across the bedrock on Ahch-to, in her mistaken rush to defend the Caretakers’ village against what actually turned out to be fishermen returning home. Blushing at the embarrassing memory, Rey recalled that she had focused on the village and put all her will and energy into simply  _ getting  _ there; there was no physical trick to it.

“Maybe it’s the same here…” she uttered, gathering her backpack and staff. Walking to the start of the slope, Rey realized that she’d probably still need a free hand, even if she did… whatever this was going to be, so she slotted the quarterstaff into the tight space between the bag and her back.

Remembering how she focused on pulling her staff to her, she took a solitary look up at the reeds framing the top of the hill, and closed her eyes, opening herself up once again to the Force.

This time, she didn’t just visualize her objective; she visualized  _ everything beyond it _ .

Life on this planet had felt alien and unfamiliar before; now, it was like embracing an old friend.  _ This  _ time, the forest beyond hummed in complete synchronicity with her own life energy; she could practically feel the great creaks and cracks of the auburn tree trunks, the minute scampering of small, foraging creatures along their branches like they were her own. 

Extending her senses out even farther, Rey could easily discern the dewey beauty of flowers in bloom, the distinct pitter-patter of a stream trickling through a rocky crevice, the spirituous chirps of two birds dancing in the air…

Rey sweatily pulled her senses back, momentarily overwhelmed by the cacophony of life. But she had what she needed.

She knelt, feeling the life-giving soil with her bare knee and hands. Like when she had meditated for her first lesson on Ahch-to, Rey understood the balance of life even just below her. She knew that even here on this Lonely Planet, organisms had lived, died, and borne new life themselves, the Force propelling them along all the while.

That suffusing, all-encompassing thought in mind, Rey transposed herself into the roots of the world. And let the Force build within her, coiling like a spring, until…

Rey felt a brief shudder. She opened her eyes.

She was no longer on the ground. Though she wasn’t quite standing among the reeds, either.

Rather, she was  _ dangling precipitously _ , her good hand locked in a death grip with a gnarled tree root half-exposed in the hillside. Her body ached with the effort of keeping itself from sliding down the hill. Rey pushed it all aside, looking up to gauge how much farther she had.

She couldn’t help the cackle that flew from her lips.

One meter. Maybe two.

Still chuckling, Rey dug her feet into the dirt, finding traction in more roots that had fused themselves within the earth. She then pulled herself up with her good arm, swinging her legs onto flat ground as she did. 

The young woman rolled onto her side, being careful not to put untoward pressure on her bad arm. Curious, she glanced around for the tree whose roots had saved her.

The treeline was half a kilometer away.


	5. The Forest

Her back to the gully, Rey stood and looked about to gain her bearings. The field was even larger than she had seen through the Force; its tan reeds extending a number of kilometers - with the occasional tree or bush breaking the grassy uniformity - to a small mountain range far to Rey’s west.

Her sight of the plain was broken to the north and east by a many-hued treeline; one that was close enough that she strained to pick out any landmarks beyond it. And of course, there was the gully to her south, the one she’d just escaped. She’d presumed that it had, at least partially, been caused by the Falcon’s crash, but the extensive furrow it carved in the landscape indicated erosion, meaning it was likely a channel for rain or snow runoff.

Rey swore. That meant the next time there was a serious storm, the Falcon itself would be flooded, and in time, destroyed even further by the elements.

But she knew she couldn’t worry about that now.

Still, as her eyes tracked the water-worn ravine’s diminutive path into the trees, Rey recognized a use for that knowledge. After all, there  _ had  _ been water here before, meaning that there could be a natural reservoir deeper within the forest.

Her goal settled and her staff in hand, Rey made for the trees closest to the gully. She kept her Force-attuned senses extended, on alert for the slightest hint of danger from her surroundings. But as she drew closer to the trees - the generous canopy already providing shade from the rising sun - Rey failed to perceive any real hazards; no lithe, four-limbed predators hiding in the branches, no parasitic spores, no carnivorous plants. 

Just the wind, the leaves, and the foragers.

This last group was in clear abundance, their small, rodent-like forms continually caught in the periphery of Rey’s vision as they traversed the trees like a great highway. But it became apparent to the young woman, as she advanced beyond the treeline, that they were many because their sustenance was of equal plentitude.

Leafy bushes laden with small, smooth berries practically  _ littered  _ the already-thickly-forested terrain. It was in great contrast with the forests of Takodana, the one other arboreal biome Rey had visited in her travels; that was a place full of natural paths amidst shrubbery and trees almost-manicured in their appearance. In comparison,  _ this  _ forest was… Well, Rey reckoned that “overgrown” would prove to be an understatement.

Regardless, Rey ventured up to one of these fruity bushes and bundled up a few berries in a makeshift wrap from her bag. She knew there was a good chance they were poisonous, but she also recognized she’d likely have to risk it once the rations were used up. 

She continued onward, her staff shouldering her weight as she navigated the prickly bushes and outsized tree roots. Vertigo at the seemingly-endless forest threatened to make her lose her way amid the dense foliage, but every time she began to be overwhelmed, Rey stopped in her tracks, closed her eyes, and opened herself up once again to the Force.

It was strange, but every time she did that, her surroundings seemed to “order” themselves within her mindscape. By the time she opened her eyes again, Rey instinctively  _ knew  _ the direction she needed to go in, and continued upon that mental heading. She wondered if it was a byproduct of the Force’s potency on Ittezna, and if, with enough training, any Force-user,  _ anywhere _ could center themselves like that.

The peculiar journey continued for the better part of a day, with Rey following the Force and the occasional hint of a creek echoing through the boughs. Eventually, she decided on a rest, sitting at the foot of one of the great trees. Her feet ached immensely, so off went her muddy boots and odorous socks. Awkwardly managing a one-handed massage of her sore soles, Rey took her new environment in. 

She found herself dumbstruck.

Rey had lived most of her life amid sand dunes. Some small, some rather large. Some that hid buried treasure in the form of derelict ships, others that concealed sinking pits that’d swallow a scavenger whole. 

They were plentiful on Jakku, and she  _ hated  _ them. 

To her they’d symbolized death; some dunes were just that - lifeless piles of sand - but others held nests of poisonous creatures that’d leave a person pale and half-conscious kilometers away from help. Finding salvage, too, carried a mortal danger, thanks to opportunists like Teedo who’d ambush the “lucky” for their gleaming bits and bobs. And the sinking pits… well, their danger was already apparent.

_This_ planet was everything Jakku wasn’t, a fact that continued to frankly confound Rey. She never could have imagined such a pure excess of _life_ , happily thriving and free of hazard, anywhere in the known galaxy.

Part of her wanted to be suspicious, to doubt what her senses and even the Force itself had told her about this place. But Luke had vouched for this so-called retreat, too. What reason did she have to doubt  _ him? _

Still, she had to be sure.

Nestled in the hollow, her hands and feet firmly planted in the leaves and the dirt, Rey closed her eyes. She focused on the sensation of the crackling leaves under her palms, the slight petrichor of the dirt intermingling with her toes. Then, as a traveler in this land of feeling, Rey set out, her senses attuned for motion and intent. Foremost was the tree at her back; random, yet subtle vibrations indicated a canopy lazily swaying in the breeze as the foraging lifeforms criss-crossed its august branches.

Rey piggy-backed her perception on one of these Scurriers, its primal mind offering no resistance to the young woman’s curious psyche. From its eyes, she could see  _ dozens  _ of its furry, bushy-tailed kin, all swiftly navigating the wooden, leafy maze with purpose. She saw her host sprint across six branches in half as many seconds, making miniscule stops to pluck a hanging nut here, hoard a few berries there.

It repeated this sequence multiple times over the space of just a handful of minutes, occasionally crossing paths with its brethren doing the exact same thing. There was no conflict, however; the scurriers just ignored each other and moved on to another over-hanging fruit or tiny cache, as they were, like seemingly everything else here, in complete abundance. 

Only  _ once  _ did Rey’s scurrier physically stop to regard another of its kind, coming in close and sniffing the opposite rodent with its rotund little nose amid the cross-traffic. Its counterpart did the same, circling on the wide branch. High-pitched cheeps emitted from their buck-toothed mouths during the whole affair. Rey, mutely observing other pairs of the creatures playing out the exact same dance on other branches, had no clue as to what was transpiring, so she probed slightly deeper into the scurrier’s mind.

Her head snapped back in surprise, bumping against the bark. A surging and intoxicating heat, one that Rey was only vaguely-familiar with, began to pool in her nether regions.

She gulped and panted, the connection broken.

“ _ Oh. _ ”

Rey had failed to consider exactly  _ how _ life had occurred in such plentitude on 441-B.

Of course, she knew what sex was; she’d scavenged enough illicit holos and heard enough gossip between her peers on Jakku to understand the basics of it all… plus a bit more. 

But when life reproduced  _ there _ , it was a surreptitious act, hidden away in some underground warren or lamp-lit tent from predators of varying kinds. In her own hidey-hole, Rey had tried self-pleasure a handful of times, only to be stymied by a profound feeling of insecurity, even within the triple-plated walls of that old AT-AT.

Here, it was done so openly, so  _ easily _ , amidst the hustle and bustle of daily life. Just part of a routine, like finding food, or sleeping. There was no worry of anybody or anything taking advantage in that moment of vulnerability. Even in the primitive minds of the scurriers, Rey could sense an almost-symbiotic understanding of respect and consent.

The young woman sighed, relief overwhelming her, as she once again drew her eyes upwards to the natural menagerie.

By the grace of the Force, this truly was a  _ pure  _ place.


	6. The Pond

Reinvigorated by her discovery, Rey pulled her socks and boots back on, grimacing slightly at their filthiness. Once she’d found that elusive pond…

She paused in reaching down to retrieve her bag and staff, struck still by something in that thought. 

_Pond._ Why did that suddenly feel more significant? Her possessions back in hand, Rey reached out with her senses and dug deep into her memories, quickly realizing that she _had_ seen a pond. Well, not her, exactly.

It had only been in the scurrier’s field of vision for a second before becoming lost in a flurry of movement. Regardless, Rey focused on that recollection, straining it for any usable information. She only became aware that she was walking when her foot brushed an especially-large rock. 

Rey successfully fought the temptation to snap out of the fugue state. No, she’d follow  _ this  _ journey to its completion. It wasn’t long until she discerned that the image of the watery body was progressively becoming clearer, beyond even what the keen eyes of the scurrier had seen. It was a pond, yes. Surrounded by overgrowth, but moderately-large, about the size of a stock freighter in width. Fed by a small rivulet flowing from under a clump of boulders. There was life in the pond too; some underwater ferns, a school of petite fish, and... something else.

Rey couldn’t pin down what it was, exactly. Just that it was diffused over a wide area.

Still pondering the strange creature, the scavenger-Jedi barely noticed the squish of mud under her boots, nor the supplication of that sensation to the cool embrace of water. It was only when the ground gave way entirely, when Rey was literally  _ mid-fall,  _ that she finally snapped out of her moving meditation.

Reacting quickly, she dropped her staff and twisted around, flinging her backpack full of items she most definitely did  _ not _ want waterlogged back onto the dry shore. Then, she simply let gravity take its course.

Rey met the water on her back, the sudden jolt of impact smarting on her still-recovering body. With an arm still in traction, she couldn’t float, at least not while prone. But instead of righting herself and standing in the shallow water, Rey held her breath, and let herself sink.

The water swept over her, inundating her clothes. The simple knot that had kept her hair tied back and away from her face finally came free, letting brown locks drift and cloudily frame an expression of total contentment. Rey’s eyes were closed, her mouth slack; as comforting as the revelation of this world’s true nature was, it paled in respect to  _ this _ . 

Suspended in nothingness, her limbs ceased to ache. The layer of dry, dusty stickiness that had accumulated on her skin in the past day? Evaporated in a cleansing swell. The everpresent sting of her many cuts and scratches? Subsumed in murky coolness. 

Rey had been spellbound by the abundance of water on Ahch-To, but hadn’t the time to explore that fascination. But now, submerged and indelibly  _ unburdened  _ by the rejuvenating effect of this, a mere fresh-water pond, Rey could imagine living like this for decades, if not a lifetime. This was only compounded by the sensation of the underwater ferns lightly tickling the backs of her knees, the subtle oscillations of fish flitting around and away from her body.

But as the pressure on her lungs grew, Rey admitted that, to truly dwell below the waves as she wished, she’d have to become more than who she was. A better Jedi, definitely, but even more than that; the young woman would have to outright  _ transcend  _ her physical limitations.

Like Luke did.

Struck by the realization, Rey pursed her lips and made a slight “hmm” sound. She paused at the odd sensation, then bouncily repeated it a few more times, delighting in the bassy, unusual timbre of the water-modulated vibration. This made her lungs pang even more, so Rey - reluctance obvious in her movements - reoriented herself and slowly stood in the water, breathing heavily as her head and shoulders broke the surface.

She wiped the water and errant strands of hair from her eyes, studying her watery surroundings from a more corporeal perspective. Besides her belongings - the bag on the shore, the staff bobbing up-and-down in the water adjacent - little was different from her vision. The pond glimmered as a few errant rays of sun seeped through the trees and overgrowth surrounding it. Rey found herself cast in an ethereal fog as sky and moisture mingled - an arresting sight that  _ definitely  _ wasn’t a Force manifestation.

Finding herself centered without even having to concentrate, Rey grabbed her staff and waded over to a shoreside boulder that had a level-enough surface, free of moss or other vegetation. She took in mouthfuls of water as she did, her eyes shutting in easy bliss at finally being able to quench the day-long thirst. 

Upon reaching the rock, Rey loosened the binding straps on her bracer and belt, depositing them atop the stone surface. Her dark tunic soon followed suit, though removing it was a challenge in itself. Rey had to keep her disabled arm, now divested of its sling, perfectly still as she opened the thick garb at the middle, then shimmied it off her good arm. She then found herself having to angle her torso in a  _ quite  _ awkward way so the thing would drop from her body without putting weight on the injured limb. As it finally hit the water with a heavy *plop*, Rey decided not to wear it again. Pulling it back on would be a trial and a half, but on top of that, she simply  _ didn’t need it _ in a moderately-warm climate like 441-B’s. The abundance of sweat stains on her once-white undershirt - visible even amidst the water-saturated fabric - was evidence enough of that.

But Rey plucked the tunic back out of the water anyway, laying it out on the rock as a makeshift blanket. At least it  _ would _ be, once it dried. As the scavenger-Jedi regarded her undershirt, she began to second-guess that idea. In addition to her perspiratory leavings, the bottom front of her shirt was dyed a dank yellow. Rey gulped, suddenly self-conscious. She  _ had  _ wet herself, hadn’t she?

The young woman dipped her head in placid resignation, realizing that the dark tunic would be the  _ only  _ part of her outfit not so unsightly dirty. But in that thought, Rey hesitated. And pondered.

_ Unsightly. _

Why would that even be an issue on a planet with  _ no people _ ? 

Then Rey went one step further, muttering out a thought that instantly sent excited shivers down her spine.

“Why should I even care about  _ clothing _ ?”

Unlike Jakku, this planet was temperate to the extreme. There was no such thing as a blistering day or a bone-chilling night, and therefore, no such need for protection against the elements. Rey knew that they’d landed close to the equator, so even Ittezna’s winters would be warmer than most. She also, conceivably, wouldn’t have to worry about the bacteria on her clothes that a mere scrubbing with water would never truly remove, nor the diseases and infections they would inevitably bring. 

The only practical issue lay in her boots, which she’d still need to traverse long distances without hurting herself. Rey was silently thankful that she’d packed a spare for  _ those _ , though she still ached with regret for their origins.

Suddenly reminded that being immersed in water would  _ definitely  _ ensure the use of that extra pair, Rey hopped up onto the rock, flattening the sodden tunic with her soggy bottom. Thankfully, her boots seemed none the worse for wear, the pond having cleaned the much-accumulated mud from all but the soles. Even so, she unlooped the leather catches on their backs and pulled them off, before giving them a good thirty-second shake each. These, Rey knew, she needed as dry as possible. 

The same could be said of her calf-length socks… had she planned on ever wearing them again, anyway. On Jakku, she hadn’t even bothered with such garments, having found a pair of boots that breathed well enough and were  _ far  _ easier to clean at the end of the day. So Rey plainly stripped them off and set them aside; the fabric would still be of use, in any case.

She exhaled as her bare feet glided into contact with the pond, its water a salve on her aching, calloused soles. Rey spent a few moments taking pleasure in the contact, flicking the cool liquid with her toes. She hadn’t gotten to do this on Ahch-To, as prevalent as water was there. 

Withdrawing her good arm into her sleeveless undershirt, Rey then did something that she  _ also  _ hadn’t gotten to do on Ahch-To. Repeating many of the same motions she had done with her tunic, she - eventually - got the shirt over her head and onto her lap. 

Then she just  _ sat _ , topless, the slight hunch of her trim, bare-backed posture melding with the water-wrought curves of the boulder. Rey hadn’t gotten a moment like this since before she’d joined the Resistance. There were no private quarters in the few boltholes she’d found refuge in since Crait, just cramped, sweaty solidarity. And on missions, she’d always kept her mind on the objective, never straying to indulge in a sight or really,  _ any  _ other extraneous sensation. 

And now Rey found herself on a planet full of them.

Unable to prevent the wide grin that spread across her face, Rey turned her attention to the last articles of clothing she’d ever wear, if she had her way. Even with her earlier “alterations” the gray pants were clearly on their last legs; Rey saw splitting seams even as high up as her thighs. Not seeing an easy way to rid herself of them while sitting on the rock, the scavenger-Jedi hopped back into the water, a coo escaping her lips as its chilly confines enveloped her.

A few seconds of one-handed fiddling later, and the damaged leggings sluggishly fell to the bottom of the pond. As she bent down and retrieved them, her eyes caught a glimpse of her panties; even submerged, they made Rey’s face contort into a rictus of disgust. Not even taking a second to first discard her pants, the young woman hurriedly pushed the sodden underwear down her legs, then whisked them away with her feet. That was one piece of fabric she would  _ not  _ be reusing.

Rey breathed out in relief. But her breath caught as she realized something.

She was  _ naked _ . And outdoors, no less. 

The scavenger-Jedi shook her head, wet bangs slapping against her temples, trying to restore her sense of resolve. Yes, her upbringing on Jakku practically encouraged bundling up as much as possible, both to protect against the sun and sand, but also more-sentient dangers. But this,  _ this  _ was a safe place. Luke had promised her that. All of her senses confirmed it. Hells, the  _ Force itself  _ told her. 

Shivering, Rey willed her good arm down from where it’d reflexively flung upwards to shield her slim breasts, buoying just above the waterline. As it lowered, it unintentionally brushed her much-engorged nipples, eliciting a sharp gasp out of the young woman. The  _ heat  _ from before, when she’d unintentionally eavesdropped on the scurriers’ mating rituals, returned like a charging luggabeast. 

Rey bit her lip as her hand drifted below the water, fingers languidly wafting down her taut abdomen to the matted hairs of her crotch. She gulped, the growing blush on her face and neck contrasting brightly with the leaden turquoise of the pond. Just seconds ago she’d been ambivalent about the very idea of being nude out here;  _ now, _ she was outright touching herself. But that thought made the heat burn even  _ deeper _ , transforming the water surrounding Rey into an insulating element for her arousal. 

Screwing her eyes shut in heady concentration, she pushed forward, shaping her fingers into a V and hungrily massaging her pussy lips. The ensuing jolt from  _ just  _ that was unlike anything she’d ever felt. Rey absentmindedly understood that there was a singular detail that had been missing from all those earlier, failed attempts at masturbation. Head tilting upward, she opened her eyes, taking in the tops of the trees, the cloudless, rosy sky, the birds lazily gliding on the breeze.

Rey ground her palm into her clit at this, a state of being that had been missing all her life, and was rewarded with an orgasm. Her very first.

For both a second and an eternity, Rey was no longer in the pond. Nor in her body, even. 

She was  _ above. _

Above the trees, the birds, the sky, the nebula, the stars.

She saw Leia, brow furrowed over a tactical console. 

She saw Poe, flying an X-Wing in pitched combat, BB-8 bouncing in the compartment behind him.

She saw Finn, dressed in stormtrooper gear, running down a dark corridor, soundlessly talking into his comm.

She saw  _ Kylo Ren _ , on the bridge of a Star Destroyer, glowering at escaped prisoners as their transport maneuvered out of his grasp.

And then, all at once, they paused. Rey could discern expressions of surprise, puzzlement…

And knowing.

She gasped. 

Legs turning to jelly, Rey collapsed into the water. Her awareness quickly returned as her bubbly rear landed among the mud and the pebbles.

Did she…

Did  _ they… _

But as she wriggled back to the surface, blinking and wiping the water out of her eyes, Rey saw that she had a more pressing issue.

She was no longer alone in the pond.


	7. The Creature

It looked like a tongue.

Rey arched her head in abject puzzlement, even as her body cautiously backed itself towards her staff resting on the shore.

A fluted, teal-colored tongue.

It was protruding from the otherwise-unmarred surface of the pond, just a dozen or so meters away from the young woman. It hadn’t yet made a move towards her, remaining motionless except for a rhythmic undulation that Rey could just slightly perceive.

She wondered if  _ this  _ was the mysterious, disseminated presence she felt in her vision. The appendage was clearly part of a larger creature, after all.

Rey stopped.

_ Larger  _ creature.

She looked down, then around the perimeter of the pond. She swore.

Rey scrambled back onto the shore, onto the boulder, expecting a great  _ snap,  _ the “pond” folding on itself in an attempt to ensnare and consume its prey.

But that didn’t happen.

The nude scavenger-Jedi crouched on the stone, ready to act, her staff fixed in a defensive stance against… a body of water with a tongue sticking out of it.

Rey blinked. Didn’t breathe. Silently drew a small rock to her palm, and threw it into the water a slight distance from the fleshy protrusion.

No reaction.

She reached out, testing it from within the Force. 

No reaction.

She let her breath out, clearing her throat. “H-hello?”

No reaction.

Rey’s freckled shoulders slumped as she lowered her staff to rest on her leg. Her face was still fraught, but her voice was light. “You’re either an  _ excellent  _ predator… or you’re a tongue in a pond.”

The tongue in a pond continued to slightly undulate.

The young woman sighed as she ran her hand across her forehead, slicking back her wet hair. 

She didn’t sense any malevolent intent. And given what she knew about life on this planet, she really didn’t think it was masking it either. 

Almost to confirm this, the tongue slipped back into the water, making a quavering sound that evoked, of all things, sadness. Rey narrowed her eyes, thinking. Why would be it  _ sad  _ if it didn’t even want to eat her?

A light breeze caressing her soaked body brought her back to reality. She shook her head. 

Either way, bathtime was over.

***************

Rey spent the rest of the day simply exploring her surroundings, after making a base camp of sorts not far from the pond. Sticking to her waterside idea, she wore nothing but her boots - somewhat  _ less  _ comfortable without socks than her Jakku pair, but still manageable - and her leather belt, which she loosened slightly so as to not chafe against her skin. Her makeshift arm sling and staff, its grips now reinforced with cloth wraps torn from her clothes, completed the minimal ensemble. 

She was having the time of her life.

The Force proved as essential a companion as her staff, guiding her through the trees without difficulty, as it had before. She’d encountered a new creature, a double-snouted fox-like animal bounding between the great oaks with its litter trailing in playful pursuit. She’d experienced new sights as she finally happened upon the opposing border of the forest; beyond it sprawled a vast wooded valley, with the  _ barest  _ hint of a lake or ocean at its farthest end. 

But most importantly, she’d felt a change come upon herself. Traversing the forest despite nearly being as nude as the day she was born stoked a fire within Rey. It invigorated her, giving her energy despite her sparse diet of native berries - which ended up quite delectable and poison-free - and ration capsules. But beyond that, it made her horny beyond belief. 

On several occasions during her hike, Rey stopped to, ostensibly, give her feet a break. But in these brief rests under the leaves and boughs, her mind would always drift to the latent absurdity of her current state, of the fact that she could  _ feel  _ the mud and dry leaves mashing against her bare bottom. However, rather than being discomfited, Rey instead felt a magnetic, excited  _ buzz  _ in her belly and genitals. 

Before too long, she’d find her head tipped back against the tree, her fingers lightly massaging her thighs and threading themselves between the short hairs of her mons pubis. She’d continue this self-exploration by spreading her pussy lips apart, feeling the sticky wetness of her arousal congeal on her trembling digits. 

By the third or fourth time, she was tasting it.

She’d treat her clitoris like a scavenged power cell at a recharging station, letting its latent charge build in volume until the little red bead was fully-engorged and on the verge of overload. And when she’d  _ finally  _ touch herself there, it’d be just seconds until her back was arching, her sphincter clenching, her toes scrabbling in the dirt, as Rey experienced the second, then third, then fourth, and so on, orgasm of her life.

By the sixth, she joked to herself that she might as well bury some seeds down where her juices had leaked.

She didn’t know how prescient that thought actually was.


	8. The Dream

It was nearly dark when Rey returned to her little makeshift camp, which in reality was just a small, cleared space between some large, exposed tree roots near the pond.

She was exhausted, in more ways than one.

Drawing her thick tunic from where it rested atop her backpack - she meant to use it as a sort of camouflage against the curious fingers of the scurriers - Rey knelt and flattened it against the ground as a mat, as the skin on her rear and legs was bordering on crimson from the repeated “rest stops” on the bare ground.

Using her backpack as a pillow, and the scraps of her clothes as a makeshift blanket, the young woman was sound asleep before she could even realize that she was actually quite thirsty.

***************

She was home.

Through some miracle of technology, the Resistance had done it. They’d broken through to the Lonely Planet, and found Rey with little difficulty.

She was given a hero’s welcome when they landed back at the leafy hideout on Ajan Kloss, despite her only wearing a blanket around her shoulders for modesty’s sake. Poe and Finn had done a valiant job of shielding her from the excited crowd of freedom fighters, clearing the path to a private suite that had been prepared for her.

“Take as much time as you need,” Finn had said, before closing the door with an odd wistfulness evident in his comportment. 

Rey must have spent hours in the shower, delighting in the warm water and soap separating all the dust and sweat from her body. She hardly even spent any time drying herself off, opting to flop down, still-nude, on the double-wide bed situated opposite the wall in the darkened room. 

She sighed in overt gratification, twisting her body in the freshly-laundered sheets. This was a complete luxury, even for the Resistance. So calming, yet exciting was its contact with her still-sensitive-from-the-shower skin, that a familiar heat began to pool in her nethers.

Her previous hang-ups with self-pleasure now resolved, Rey wasted no time, her hand flying down to massage her needy quim. Her palm brushed aside overgrown pubic hair - something that didn’t really bother her, actually - to reach a vulva that was already swollen, greasing her thighs and the sheets below. Spreading her legs apart to get better access, Rey drew a single digit down the edges of her folds, collecting that oh-so-precious honey that she’d recently been turned on to. But just as she sucked it off her finger with a resounding  _ pop _ , the door to her suite opened.

Finn and Poe blustered in, distracted by some trivial argument that Rey - frozen in her movement on the bed - couldn’t quite discern. An argument that came to a sudden halt as first the ex-stormtrooper, then the pilot, took in the view.

Poe stuttered out a “We-we just were coming to check up on you.” He gulped, struggling to find more words. Luckly, Finn took over. “To see if you needed anything.” Poe nodded. “Yeah.”

The silence that came over the room could have lasted seconds, or minutes; Rey couldn’t really tell. All she could  _ do  _ was remain as she was; her naked, slim body propped up by pillows, one hand half in her mouth, the other palming her most private place. All she could  _ think  _ about was how all that emotional baggage of the past - her hang-ups with Finn’s secretive attitude and Poe’s reckless demeanor - all completely evaporated when confronted with the prospect of total isolation. 

And now, she was coming to realize that, in this moment, what she needed… was them.

She took her hand from her lips, beckoned them over. They hesitated.

Rey’s voice was commanding, yet besotted with desire. “ _ Come here _ .”

Another moment passed, then Finn, his face hardening into a familiar resolve, crossed the distance to the bed. Poe was visibly more of two minds, hands fidgeting in the pockets of his orange flight suit. “Look, I…” he started, but the other man cut him off. “Just come over here,” Finn, now sitting not far from Rey, said. The glare he fixed on Poe communicated a serious sincerity, with more than a little overt longing mixed in.

The pilot’s Adam’s apple bobbed slightly, then its owner awkwardly made his way to sit alongside his friends. It was now Rey who struggled to find the right words; how could she tell them exactly how much she cared for them, how much she appreciated them not only as comrades and friends, but also, as it was now clear to her, something much more than that? 

Suddenly, she felt pressure, an acute warmth on the hand that she’d let drop to the sheets. It was Finn, caressing it with a tenderness she was honestly unsurprised by. She smiled sweetly as he met her eyes and quietly said, “We know.” 

And then, scooting up a few feet to the head of the bed, he compounded that statement by kissing the young Jedi full on the lips. It became clear to Rey immediately that Finn wasn’t really an experienced kisser, but what he lacked in knowledge, he made up in full-blown eagerness; she grinned widely, cradling the ex-trooper’s head in her hands and returning the kiss with similar enthusiasm. 

Their tongues intertwined. Finn tasted of detonite and jogan fruit; Rey plainly hoped that she had as interesting a flavor. She felt a hand grace her belly, pausing as if unsure where to move. Her own hand helped it along, placing it atop her breast. Shuddering, Rey exhaled into Finn’s mouth as his rough-hewn palm grazed her nipple as he proceeded to tenderly massage her mammary. 

Moaning at the contact, Rey still couldn’t help but inch her eyes open to look past Finn, at the room’s sole unoccupied inhabitant, only to find that he was somewhat more  _ occupied  _ than she had imagined. Poe had removed his boots and was sitting cross-legged down towards the end of the bed.

He was also touching himself. 

Rey’s eyes widened as she saw the pilot’s fingers teasing a manhood only  _ somewhat _ hidden by the baggy flightsuit. As he made eye contact - and held it, continuing to play with his clothed erection - Rey parted her lips from Finn’s and, almost-too-sharply, twisted his head around to look at Poe.

The men shared a moment’s silent communication. Finn licked lips made swollen from his makeout with Rey. A ghost of a smile began to lift the edges of Poe’s mouth. The ex-trooper spoke, his voice unsure yet tempestuous: “Can I see it?” The smile widened, but paused as its owner’s eyes flicked to Rey, seeking permission. 

The scavenger-Jedi nodded so fiercely that she knocked Finn’s collarbone with her jaw.

She just  _ barely  _ managed to constrain her hiss of pain, while Poe similarly successfully stifled a guffaw. Finn was confused and horny. The pilot accommodated him, unzipping his suit down his chest, exposing a tan undershirt. Poe licked his own lips as he drew the zipper even  _ lower _ . To the surprise - and pleasure - of his soon-to-be lovers, his erect dick had already slipped outside the confines of his gray undershorts, and so sprouted out between his thighs just as the zipper ended its descent.

Both onlookers drew in a sharp breath at the sight, inhaling an intoxicating musk that had just begun to permeate the air. The man had a  _ joystick _ . It was perhaps a little on the reedy side, but it was  _ long _ , and, the scavenger-Jedi numbly noticed, uncircumsized as well,. Poe drew back that protective foreskin, beginning to masturbate anew. The opposing pair’s jaws dropped simultaneously, and Finn unconsciously drew closer, on hands and knees, to Poe’s continuing presentation.

Not to be outdone by the peckish pilot, Rey practically fell over herself in reaching Finn’s outstretched rear, who, to the young woman’s quiet amusement, was still  _ fully  _ clothed, from his hastily-repaired leather jacket to his scuffed stormtrooper boots. Ignoring how implausible it was that Finn still possessed these items after Crait, Rey got to work on the man’s footwear. The ex-trooper, so entranced by Poe’s rhythmic tugging, barely noticed the loosening of the boot fastenings around his ankles, nor the cool air of the room intermixing with his sweaty soles as Rey removed his socks as well. 

Finn did notice, however, a firm  _ squeeze  _ on his thigh. 

He glanced back, and saw Rey hungrily leering at him, playfully tugging on the hem of his dark trousers. Still in a hurry to get back to closing in on Poe’s waiting cock, the ex-trooper righted himself onto his knees, quickly undoing his belt and pants. He would have pushed them off too, if it hadn’t been for his objective shimmying  _ his  _ unzipped flight suit from his shoulders and nudging it - and his underpants - down his legs, and off the bed.

Finn muttered a curt “Damn you, Dameron,” before falling back onto his hands and making his way into Poe’s  _ personal  _ air space. The man took his hand from his swollen rod just in time for Finn to plant his mouth on it. Rey might have thought it strange to see somebody who just a minute before seemed unfamiliar with the act of kissing dive  _ right  _ into oral sex, but she was too distracted with getting the person-in-question’s pants off to notice. 

As Finn laid wet and sloppy kisses on Poe’s dick, Rey practically had to mount the ex-trooper in order to pull his pants and briefs down. As they slipped below the curve of his ass, Rey was stunned by a scent so outright potent that she had to reel back, take a moment to fully absorb it. In the next, she was spreading those muscular cheeks, inhaling deeply of Finn’s quivering asshole and tight scrotum. She even chanced a taste, tantalizingly running her tongue along the man’s bittersweet buttcrack. 

Meanwhile, all the activity at, or rather,  _ in  _ his rear only enlivened Finn’s own exploratory efforts. He’d transitioned to full-on sucking, with the receiver of his efforts haltingly running his fingers along the ex-trooper’s close-shorn temples. Rey, too, was diving into carnality, taking Finn’s scrotum into her mouth while her own fingers worked in a frenzy at her weeping snatch. The taboo ludicrousness of that sensation, of  _ moving her lover’s testicles around in his ballsack with her tongue _ , sent the young woman’s libido into overdrive. In cumming, she wetly disengaged from Finn’s balls, falling back onto the bed, her back arching into the climax; her fluids sprayed out onto the sheets and the backs of the ex-soldier’s legs.

Around that time, Poe came too, ejaculating a hot load right down Finn’s throat - or he  _ would  _ have, had his prostrating supplicant not coughed it out on reflex. The pilot cringed, then whispered a quick but heartfelt apology that Rey, mind still reeling from her own orgasm, could only half-hear. 

Finn hadn’t seemed to mind, however, having pulled himself up from Poe’s crotch in order to place, of all things, a  _ chaste kiss  _ on the man’s befuddled lips. Rey’s closed lips widened in a heartfelt smirk, then opened in surprise as she realized that the ex-trooper  _ hadn’t even gotten off yet _ , his own generous erection dangling in the close space between him and Poe.

Well, this needed to be rectified. Immediately.

Rey hobbled on her knees over to the embracing pair, and in a sultry tone, whispered, “Looks like your blaster’s still charged,  _ trooper. _ ” Finn visibly bit his lip as Poe looked down and cringed  _ again  _ in airy shame at forgetting to pay heed to his bed partner’s needs. But together, the pilot and scavenger-Jedi slowly pushed Finn back onto the heap of pillows at the head of the bed. Poe divested the ex-trooper of the jacket which had previously belonged to him, all those months before; Rey followed through by lifting the man’s open-necked shirt above his head, leaving him totally naked in front of the two Resistance fighters. 

Finn, propped up in comfort, merely linked his hands behind his head, a smug look on his face evident as his thick, dark cock twitched in the recirculated breeze. Almost in unison, Rey and Poe reached for the ex-trooper’s implement, with the former dexterously brushing the other’s off as they met. The pilot murmured in dissent, but Rey silenced him with a solid peck on the lips, motioning towards Finn. Getting the message, Poe coolly moved up the sheets until he was almost sitting side-by-side with the man… and starting giving him  _ proper  _ instruction on how to kiss another being.

Finn moaned as the other man’s mouth effortlessly locked onto his, as a brazen tongue slid forth and tangled with his own in a lustful dance. His erection, too, reacted to Poe’s ministrations, going rock-solid in Rey’s relatively-small hands. She gave it an experimental lick; unsurprisingly, it tasted a lot like the ex-trooper’s balls. The young woman hummed in approval, positioning herself over Finn.

One Poe-restrained nod later, and Rey was enveloping Finn to the hilt.

She groaned as pleasure and discomfort mixed; it was easily the largest thing she’d ever had inside her. But as she slowly began to rock her hips against Finn’s, his mushroom-like head near-instantly rubbing against her g-spot, all her complaints evaporated. Indeed, the young woman’s back arched in ecstatic pleasure, as her lover moaned into  _ his  _ lover’s mouth at the sensation of Rey’s tight vaginal walls contracting around him. 

The three had almost reached a perfect harmony in their lovemaking; Rey bounced rapidly on Finn’s cock as he madly made out with Poe, whose rehardening dick grew bigger in the ex-trooper’s own teasing, testing grip. 

But then the door to the suite opened again.

Rey squinted as the light from the corridor temporarily blinded her; who  _ was  _ this sudden visitor? Whoever it was eluded the notice of Finn and Poe, the former panting and gasping as he neared orgasm.

The door closed. Rey’s eyes readjusted to the artificial twilight. 

And met the gaze of one Ben Solo.

The young woman’s insides went numb, her lips soundlessly working at a single word.

“ _ What? _ ”

The fallen apprentice didn’t answer. He simply stepped closer, coming into clearer definition. 

The long black locks of the supposed Supreme Leader of the First Order had been trimmed back, resembling a hairstyle more clean-cut in appearance. He wore the dark vest and off-white shirt of a spacer. Of his father.

Rey’s vision swimmed in confusion and emotion as  _ everything  _ seemed to happen at once. 

The rich timbre of Ben's voice, heard as if underwater. “ **_I’m here for you, Rey._ ** ” 

The wet, pulsing heat of Finn’s cum flooding her cervix. 

And her own perception shrinking to a pinpoint of light, before being subsumed entirely in the sound of the forest.


	9. The Creature, Revisited

Rey’s eyes flew open in the temperate darkness.

Her throat ached. Her quim tingled. Her skin  _ burned. _

She threw the rags off of her, feeling the built-up heat radiate off her nude body into the night.

It was still too hot.

Turning over - on her good side, luckily - Rey tore the makeshift rug from under her, leaving just the dank ground underneath. She laid like that for a minute, her hip uncomfortably digging into the dirt, before shaking her head, swearing.

Still. Too. Hot.

She sat up, her mind trying to outrace the fever in her body and loins. 

Her crimson face tightened, then relaxed.

The pond.

Almost as soon as the idea had presented itself, Rey was up and running, leaving all of her possessions behind.

That she could barely see was a non-issue; she simply  _ knew  _ where to step, and what to avoid. Even so, she hissed in angry, needful distraction as the whistling forest breeze glanced off her sensitive, already-erect nipples and clit.

Just a little bit farther…

The pond glinted nebular light amidst the gloom of the forest canopy. Rey didn’t even attempt to safely lower herself in, instead opting to plainly leap into the chilly water. She grimaced as her arm-in-traction ached  _ resoundingly _ at the hard impact, but in no time at all, the pain was replaced by icy bliss as the water surrounded her. 

Like the last time she’d “entered” the pond, Rey let herself drop beneath the surface, letting her world become one of weightless, watery peace. The burning feeling of her skin decreased to a mere smoulder, before disappearing entirely. The young woman smiled at the pleasant alleviation, but as the frenzying fog cleared from her mind, she couldn’t help but reflect on what had led her here in the first place.

She wasn’t terribly perturbed by the illusion of escape that her dream had presented, nor the fact that she’d eagerly imagined sex with Finn and Poe; after all, they were both attractive and compassionate men whom Rey trusted with her life. From her perspective, it was entirely natural that her now-sexually-awakened subconscious would create a scenario where she would give herself over to them, and them to her, especially in her current isolation.

But the  _ ending  _ of the dream…

Rey caught her bottom lip with her teeth as  _ that  _ particular moment arced across her mindscape like a shooting star. 

Ben.

She shook her head.

_ Kylo Ren. _

After all, he had spurned her attempt to free him from the grip of evil, instead opting to  _ become  _ that evil instead. He’d tried to wipe out the Resistance on Crait, kill all her friends. 

And yet, she reminded herself, the last time she saw him - through their shared Force bond that had since gone dormant - she hadn’t  _ seen  _ an imposing Supreme Leader or a commander of the feared Knights of Ren.

She’d simply seen a man, forlornly kneeling in the salted dust, sadness and need clouding his vision.

At the time, Rey, looking down from the top of the Falcon’s loading ramp, had not even an ounce of patience for this pitiful sight. She’d closed the door, raised the ramp, and went on with her life among the Resistance. 

Well,  _ tried  _ to.

In the following months, that image would return in the few quiet moments that Rey was able to grab for herself. And every time it did, Rey would ask the same question: Could Kylo - could  _ Ben  _ \- come back to the light?

Even now, she didn’t quite know, but a fragment of that original hope survived in the legend of his grandfather’s redemption. The Jedi-turned-Sith went  _ decades  _ steeped in hate and pain, yet turned it all around in a magnanimous act of love and sacrifice. Could Ben too be capable of such an act?

A handful of bubbles escaped Rey’s mouth as she self-effacingly snickered at the chances of  _ that  _ happening, with her stranded and Kylo Ren commanding legions dozens of parsecs away. The bond that might have connected them in such circumstances had seemingly disintegrated after Crait, and the young scavenger-Jedi had since seen little success in her few attempts at repairing it.

Still, the fantasy was there.

A fantasy that now had Ben joining her in her bedchambers, apparently. 

Rey burst out of the water, half out of need for breath, half because she wanted a little bit of that  _ heat  _ back. Idly toying with her nipples, she thought back to the dream. Ben had come to her quarters. Would he have joined her on her bed?

The young woman’s breathing grew shallow as she remembered the sight of him, half-dressed in his quarters aboard Snoke’s destroyer. It was an embarrassing moment at the time, but like that question of redemption, the image had remained.

Now, Rey imagined it going further. 

She saw him inching down the zipper of his high pants, a look of nervous apprehension evident on his face. Rey, trying to soothe his nerves, would nod him along encouragingly. She’d take in the sight of his firm abdominals - and his cute belly button.

As the imaginary fastener would draw lower, Rey’d catch the slightest hint of a pubic hair or two, before the opaque gray of Ben’s briefs concealed them.

Rey would see him shiver as the pants dropped to pool around his feet. But she’d also see the bulge in his underpants, noticeable even in the dark room. She herself would inch forward at this point, until the young woman was but a finger-length away. She’d look up into his eyes, like she had in the lift going up to Snoke’s throne room, searching for acceptance, for consent.

An undersized splash in the water behind her brought Rey out of the fantasy, but she didn’t jump in shock. Instead, she groaned in annoyance, slowly spinning around to face her new fluted friend.

The pond tongue. 

Internally, Rey berated herself for forgetting its presence, but stopped as she realized that it was  _ responding  _ to her. Not just her movements, but her thoughts. Her emotions.  _ Both  _ times it had appeared, now, she’d been experiencing - or at least pondering - sexual pleasure.

The cooing, fleshy appendance shuddered, shaking the water from its sinews as Rey stared inquisitively at it. It was clearly docile; she definitely would have known by now if it wasn’t.

But what was its  _ purpose _ ? 

As if on cue, several small tentacles, each dripping with viscous fluid, emerged from the holes dotting the creature’s sides. 

“Oh.”

Rey reflexively took a step back. The tentacles halted in their collective unsheathing.

Eyebrow raised, she reverted that step. Without missing a beat, the wriggling blue coils eased further out of their slots.

Perhaps her question wasn’t  _ quite  _ answered, but at least she knew for sure that the… tongue… implicitly responded to her desires. She could get up out of the pond, and try to reclaim a semblance of a good night’s sleep, and it wouldn’t stop her.

But she didn’t do that.

Instead, Rey thought back to the day before, when she’d seen into the mind of the scurrier. She remembered the primal mating dance it’d performed in lockstep with a furry partner... and sharply drew in an excited breath as she realized that she was now acting out that _ very same deed _ here in the pond.

A dangerous smirk now emboldening her features, Rey stepped ever closer to the tongue, whose appendages had now grown a number of meters outward. They writhed in the nighttime air, the lower ones flicking the water around as they moved. 

For Rey, the question of “Am I  _ really  _ doing this?” was sidelined by the recognizance that she was now part of the underlying symbiosis of this place. Even if she backed away from this encounter, she’d still be drawing sustenance from the berry-laden bushes, sheltering under the living canopy, and even fertilizing the land with her body waste. 

It was becoming clear that, beyond the obvious purpose of reproduction, sex was integral in comprehending the underlying culture of this place, and by way of that, furthering her instruction in the ways of the Force.

But the fact that Rey was also just  _ extraordinarily  _ horny of her own volition helped, too.

She’d sidled up to the tongue, and it responded in kind, tentacles sliding out even further to caress the young woman’s body. At first, it was decidedly  _ strange _ ; the creature was clearly still in the process of figuring out what  _ exactly  _ the kind of being Rey even was, as it haltingly explored her body with its long tensors. 

One coil wetly teased at her temples, pushed back her hair; another looped across her chest. As they did, Rey exhaled deeply, feeling a growing tingling sensation in the areas that they’d touched. That was the fluid, she supposed.

Just as she began wondering what it’d feel like if this goo met her nethers, another tentacle slid down into that very intersection between her thighs. Even below the water, the aphrodisiac sent a supercharged jolt of pleasure up Rey’s spine as it graced her lower lips; she was unable to prevent her mouth from breathing out tempestuous little “ahhs” every time the tentacle twisted and looped around her most private area, nor herself from arching forward into the fleshy buds of the tongue.

The buds were, unsurprisingly, rough in texture, but plentiful enough in number that they tickled Rey all over the front of her body. Her engorged nipples were not excluded in this, and she giggled in excited arousal as the plump growths rubbed against her chest. 

Meanwhile, the tentacles were still exploring, charting the young woman’s orifices. They’d found little purchase in her decidedly  _ un _ -erogenous ears and belly button, nor even her mouth, which had impelled the fleshy ropes away with its unconscious exhalations. But Rey’s lower holes proved a different experience. It had thoroughly charted  _ these  _ areas, and continued to do so as the human jerked and released vinous fluids in response.

She had now wholly-slumped against the creature; it easily being able to support her weight. The twin, slender globes of her ass emerged from the water, providing an enthralling visual of the tongue’s machinations down below. 

One much-elongated tentacle, partly coiled around her thigh for added dexterity, rhythmically massaged her pussy lips, while another toyed with her clit with an almost-scientific interest. Two more blue appendages spread the young woman’s cheeks apart, while a third gently outlined the puckered ring of her anus. At first, the hole had been reflexively clenching shut through the waves of ecstasy its owner was experiencing, but as the wrinkled flesh absorbed more and more of that gummy aphrodisiac, it slowly loosened. Taking the initiative, tentacle three eased into the numbed hole.

Rey, who now had been rendered nearly-insensate by pleasure, spasmed against her portly cushion at the sudden intrusion. She’d never even thought about using  _ this  _ hole for pleasure’s sake, and yet here she was, having her bowels expertly plumbed by a pond tongue. The unfamiliar, filling feeling gave way to rolling arousal as the appendage kneaded the sensitive tissue within. The scavenger-Jedi squirmed out an orgasm - and felt the tongue flutter and keen in rapture against her as it rode her mental shockwaves.

Rey was vaguely pleased that the creature was finding enjoyment in all of this, but still felt like she was getting the better bargain in a carnal sense. Then she noticed the thick bundles of darker flesh rimming its tentacles right at the base, near the tongue itself. 

A shaky hand reached out in curiosity; no sooner had Rey just  _ lightly  _ massaged this tissue than she heard a reverberating bellow from all around her as the buds caressing her went rigid with tension.

Rey frowned as a dark, ink-like fluid bubbled up from the depths of the pond around her. Had she actually hurt the creature in some way?

This was a concern near- _ instantly _ discarded as the tentacles playing with her sensitive flesh went into a hormone-fueled frenzy. The one inside her ass suddenly had a partner, stretching the hole as they plunged in and out at an expeditious rate. The coils lightly playing with her labia and clit had followed suit, wriggling into her vaginal canal and rubbing assertively against her g-spot and inner walls.

Rey was nearly incapacitated by it all, her already-heightened sexual receptivity intensified immensely by the creature’s tingling residue and their telepathic connection. But even as she approached yet another orgasm, enough dexterity remained for her to again brush the nerves of the tongue with her fingers.

This time, the resulting howl resonated throughout her body, touching her very  _ soul _ . 

The tentacles lifted Rey into the air as both went stiff in climax. On the edge of perception, the human could detect a more-watery fluid invade her passages, but she was still so adrift in a world of bliss that she didn’t really care.

All she could really do was go completely limp. Her arms and legs dangled aimlessly as, one by one, the coils shakingly ejected from her, leaving the young woman’s holes gaping and dripping. The tongue coolly relaxed, flattening against the surface of the pond.

Rey, sprawled on her stomach on this makeshift bed, had never felt so content. She lazily smiled as her world went black with sleep.

***************

Some hours later, Rey awoke. Her eyes remained shut as she drowsily absorbed the flow of information from her other senses.

For starters, she had been moved. No longer was she on her stomach, but on her back instead, reclining in cool, squishy mud. She hadn’t gone far, judging by the subtle currents of water lapping at her feet. She could hear birds chirping and hopping about on the branches above; between that and the dim light visible even under her eyelids, the scavenger-Jedi could tell it was morning.

For a moment, Rey mused whether or not it had been all a dream, but then came the aches; she chanced a hand downwards, finding the flesh there tender and sensitive and  _ leaky _ . 

So it hadn’t been a dream, then.

She brought her hands to her face, not bothering to suppress the sardonic, deep-throated laugh that bubbled forth.

Her first sexual experience with another being, and it had been a… a  _ what _ , exactly? A tongue in a pond? The pond  _ itself _ ? And she’d only been here a day-and-a-half!

Rey’s chortling rose to a fever pitch as the absurd facts crashed together in her head.

And then stopped, just as quickly, as she realized what she was doing.

Or, more appropriately,  _ with  _ what she was doing.

For the second time in mere hours, Rey’s eyes flew open in surprise. She regarded her left arm. 

And her right.

No longer was the limb painfully-stiff, bruised, and in-traction. It was simply… normal.

She flexed it, finding naught wrong but a slight soreness. The bone was no longer fractured. 

Rey sat up with a start, trembling slightly as the cool air made contact with her muddy back, and stared curiously at the body of water in front of her. It simply had to have done this, she assumed. She’d no doubt that healing through the Force was possible - hell, one of the first things she’d translated in Luke’s books was text hinting at that very truth - but she was far from actually being able to perform the ability. 

So,  _ how _ had the pond creature done it?

It was, at the very least, Force-sensitive; it wouldn’t have been able to read and react to her thoughts otherwise. But as Rey proceeded to reach out and touch the being’s mind, she found a presence subtler and simpler than she had expected. There was little to be said for sentience, but she could have guessed as much by how the creature largely mirrored her own actions and thoughts rather than act independently.

And yet, it wasn’t like  _ she’d _ healed  _ it _ , at least not in a way obvious to her.

Rey’s dew-laden brows furrowed as she mulled over the thought.

She’d certainly provided it relief, that much was certain. Just as certain was the relief it had provided  _ her _ , if the relaxing post-coital glow she still somewhat felt was any indication. 

But what if it had gone further than that? What if  _ its  _ version of “relief” was fundamentally different from hers?

Something glinted in her peripheral version. Her instinctual thought was to the water itself, just beginning to meet the rays of the morning sun through the fog. But, no, it was still too early; the only real hint of the sun being a slight glow on one end of the rosy sky.

Rey’s eyes gradually sweeped down to her outstretched legs, then her pelvic region.

Her nethers still bore evidence of her nighttime antics; her labia were slightly sticky and irritated, her pubic hair a messy, matted sight. But these details were practically invisible to Rey, as she instead fixated on a far more foreign quality to her genitals.

They were glowing.

Slightly.

Rey’s eyes widened as she identified the cause; a fluorescent fluid leaking from her vaginal orifice. She dispassionately gathered a bit of it with her finger, eager to test the theory that had quickly synthesized in her mind.

She looked over her body for a cut or scratch to smear it on - for she’d accumulated  _ many  _ \- but immediately ran into a problem. 

There weren’t any. 

Besides the mud covering it in a few patches, her skin was as clean and porcelain as… well, she couldn’t even remember a time  _ before  _ all this that it had been this clear. Even the few scars she’d obtained on Jakku and on Snoke’s destroyer were no longer to be found.

Rey’s hands fell to the ground in amazement, a breathy “Huh,” leaving her lips.

So the pond tongue had magic healing come.

But one big question remained on her mind: Was there any chance of it  _ also  _ getting her pregnant?

Rey blew out a lighthearted, if somewhat-nervous scoff at the thought. She doubted the life on this planet was  _ that  _ symbiotic.

As if to reinforce her fearlessness at the prospect, she slid back into the pond and proceeded to wipe herself clean of the mud and... other entities. She could still sense the creature, but its presence was overall muted; not a great surprise to her, given how much she’d worked it out last night.

It wasn’t long until she stepped out of the pool and returned to her makeshift camp. Having an extra arm free turned out to be a boon as she’d gathered her clothes-turned-rags, balling them together within her tunic, which she then wrapped into an improvised knapsack. She tied  _ that  _ around the top end of her staff, shoved her feet into her boots, and pulled on her backpack, belt, and bracer. Finally, she tied her hair back into her scavenger-style three buns; where she was going, she couldn’t have her hair getting in the way.

Today, she wouldn’t just explore to the edges of the forest. Nor even the ends of the valley.

She was going as far as the Force would take her.


	10. The Journey

The first month was defined by exploration.

And not just of physical terrain.

Rey scouted through the forest, and through the valley, eventually coming upon an enormous inland sea. It was here, as she hungrily bounded down its banks, that she’d decided to put what she learned watching Luke’s day-to-day on Ahch-To to good use. 

It didn’t take much work to fashion her staff into a crude spear, but it took a great deal more to actually use it effectively. No matter how hard she’d tried, the hefty fishes would dart away a moment before impact. 

Hours had passed before Rey realized that the effort was fruitless - not because of a lack of skill on her part, but because, as she’d already experienced, life here… operated differently.

The reason the fish could so effortlessly dodge her weapon was because the Force-sensitive creatures could  _ sense  _ it coming for them. It wasn’t unlike a Jedi’s split-second forewarning of danger.

It confounded Rey to a certain extent; if all creatures here were Force-sensitive, and thus, experts at avoiding danger, how would the predator-prey dynamic even work? 

That question was answered the next day, as she observed a larger amphibious creature glide into a group of small fish - and devour most of them whole, with little reaction from its victims. This puzzled Rey even more until she’d reached out with the Force, touching the minds of the few survivors.

It was like they were dazed, somehow. Sluggish. But lacking in the physical trauma that would cause such an effect. 

Rey’s jaw dropped in uneasy awe as she quietly registered that the predator had used a form of mind trick on the fish to slow them down.

She was suddenly quite thankful that the pond in the forest had seen her as a sexual partner, instead of an appetizing meal.

The scavenger-Jedi was plainly uncomfortable with using the Force to dominate others; she’d seen, she’d  _ felt _ , enough of that from Kylo Ren. However, her other option, of subsisting entirely off woodland berries once her rations ran out, was a similarly intolerable proposition.

Rey sighed in resignation as she sat, legs crossed, on the tunic she’d rolled out over the sand, hand hovering over her spear-staff. The young woman closed her eyes, focusing on the water in front of her,  _ feeling  _ the small lives teeming in schools below its surface. Reluctantly, she picked one within a moderate range, and muttered a terse apology as she merged with its primitive consciousness.

Rey could tell that imagining the words “Stop swimming so I can impale you” would have little effect, so instead, she merely projected a sense of calm; a harder task than she’d thought, given her inner turmoil. But soon, her mind emptied of thought - as did the fish’s. She could feel its base impulses evaporate, its small fins and miniscule heart slow. 

The Force pulsed through her reflexes, and as she opened her eyes, the spear was no longer at her side, but bobbing in the waves, an invisible, yet palpable mass weighing it down.

Rey wiped a solitary tear from her cheek as she waded out towards her catch.

***************

The first year was defined by hardship.

As Rey doggedly continued her traversal of the Lonely Planet, and her education in herself and the Force, her supplies dwindled. 

Her clothes soon outlived their usefulness even as bandages and wraps, eventually becoming so sodden with filth that even a long wash in a creek couldn’t clean them. The same later came true of her thick tunic, resulting in Rey increasingly having to improvise when finding herself in need of a smooth surface to rest on.

The bottle of Corellian ale, that had so alleviated the minor wounds that the young woman had accumulated, ran dry within a few months, with Rey commemorating the last few inches with an impromptu party. Granted, this had really just equated to her downing the rest in a single gulp and haphazardly throwing the bottle into a roaring campfire she’d built at the top of a great cliff. 

But the numbing effect of the alcohol proved a blessing to Rey, who’d been on her monthly cycle at the time. On Jakku, she’d at least been able to trade scavenged parts for pain meds and gauze to help manage it. On the Lonely Planet, she had no such luxury, leading to days spent in messy agony - as hunting and foraging were made impossible in her condition - under a hastily-built shelter.

But Rey was first-and-foremost a survivor, and steadily grew better at preparing for that particular, painful, time.

She’d also prepared to switch to her extra pair of boots, using the last remaining clean scraps of fabric to pad their oversized interiors. Her original pair, which she’d found stored away on the Falcon while readying herself to face Snoke, had served her well here, but the wear and tear of her daily travails was becoming more and more apparent. The thick sole of one of them had begun to split from the rest of the footwear, and more than a few of the fastenings keeping their backs closed were irreparably loose.

At least her staff had survived with nary a scratch to show for it, but that hadn’t surprised Rey. It’d already gone through hell and back with her.

And it had continued to do so; Rey tracked along the shore for months until the sea began to curve back up in the opposite direction. Beyond the body of water at that point was a veritable wasteland; not quite a desert like Jakku, but nevertheless, a broad region of sparse vegetation and jagged, rocky terrain. 

But the young woman soldiered on, confident in her survival abilities, and bolstered by her faith in the Force leading her through to greener pastures.

It was a decision that almost cost Rey her life.

A week in, she was faring well enough, managing to adequately subsist upon the small lizards and birds that called the area home. The Force guided her to hidden oases and through shaded paths that shielded her bare skin from the worst of the unrelenting sun.

But in those shadows lurked creatures that Rey couldn’t sense, not even as she traversed the dusty passages with an expert’s handling. For these  _ predators  _ had evolved to be able to camouflage themselves in the Force, to hide until the very moment they pounced upon their victims.

The attack happened at dusk, as Rey attempted to stoke a campfire with only a few pieces of deadwood. So distracted was she in the task that her only warning was a roaring cry as the felines pounced from multiple directions. 

Even taken by surprise, Rey had enough of an instinctual reflex to smoothly roll out of the way, and enough preternatural endurance to shrug off the dirt and rocks grinding into her skin as she did.

But three-on-one, especially when “one” was completely bare and unarmed, was an untenable scenario, and by the time Rey had pulled her staff to her ready hands, one of the creatures had clawed a  _ deep  _ gouge in the flesh of her thigh.

But that was the only time they touched her.

Rey was no stranger to using her pain as resolve, and within twenty seconds, two of the felines laid crumpled to the ground, their necks broken by the furious, quick blows of her staff. The last limped away, braying pitifully. 

She doubted it’d return.

But she had bigger problems to worry about anyway, as the pain in her leg intensified and her knee was suddenly immersed in a sticky wetness. Even in the low light, Rey could see she was in  _ trouble  _ if she didn’t staunch the bleeding immediately. But she didn’t trust the handful of sodden bandages in her bag to safely do the job.

That left one option.

Rey gritted her teeth as she refocused her attention on building the flame.

***************

The first decade was defined by transcendence.

In all, Rey’s journey through the badlands lasted an entire year. From her perspective, however, time quickly became meaningless, between the intractable days spent struggling along the Force-defined paths, and the terrifying nights spent half-awake, half-on-guard against the, as it turned out,  _ many  _ lurking predators.

It was no surprise that the latter especially tested the young woman’s resolve and well-being. But after having to painfully cauterize a  _ third  _ wound, Rey firmly set her sights on rectifying the threat. Following these repeated encounters, she’d figured out how to sense the felines, despite their camouflage. 

She’d then immersed herself in that subtle, shadowy presence, effectively hiding herself like they did. But she didn’t stop there. Guided through the Force, Rey followed that specific mental signature to its strongest point, deep underground.

A day later, she emerged from the caves, and not alone. For, at that focal point, she’d encountered another feline, this one twice as big - and twice as cunning - as the others. They’d engaged in a fierce battle of wits, with both “predators” trying to dominate the other through telepathy. The fight went on for  _ hours _ , before Rey eventually realized that brute force wasn’t the way. Nor was conflict itself, even.

Instead, she strode up to the creature, projecting calm through her thoughts. Not as a way to override one’s will, but to simply make her intentions known. She’d reached out to the feline - and gave its jaw a compassionate rub.

The mental assault stopped completely as the animal reflexively kneaded against her hand, purring. It -  _ she  _ \- had never felt such empathy from any other creature in her domain.. and Rey had plenty to give.

And so the young scavenger-Jedi had found an island in the unforgiving sea of her social isolation.

The she-cat was more than willing to leave her lair with the human - Rey was able to glean enough from her mind to understand that the feline’s fiefdom had amounted to little in the face of genuine companionship.

Thankfully, the others of her kind still recognized her authority; there were no further attacks as Rey let down her barriers and steadily found her way out of the badlands, alongside her newfound friend who, it ended up, was  _ quite  _ the cuddler.

The two would remain steadfast comrades for years as they both explored the lands beyond.

Rey grew progressively more adept in the Force over this span of time, eventually learning how to expertly manipulate the world within  _ and  _ without. Even as the last of her worldly possessions - barring her trusty staff - degraded into disuse, Rey found she… well, didn’t need them. 

Years in, she no longer needed gauze or flame to treat her wounds; in those rare times of need, she’d merely open herself up to the Force, acting as a sieve for all the intrinsic energy of the world here and beyond to pass through, reviving and regenerating her.

It was just so with the rest of the items she’d scavenged from the Falcon, now mostly eroded to scrap metal by this point. Rey kept the metal tools for sentiment’s sake, a reminder of where’d she been, how far she’d come. The boots she ‘borrowed’ from Nien lived up to the engineer’s reputation for reliability, lasting twice as long as her first pair.

And yet, by the time they had finally begun to give up the ghost, Rey barely needed them. The young woman - though she was actually reaching thirty by this point - became so attuned to the invisible eddies and ley lines of the planet that she traversed its lands in great, floating leaps and bounds, her bare feet only briefly meeting the ground every few minutes.

But she had even larger aspirations in regards to that key matter of  _ traversal _ .


	11. The Dyad, Part One

The Supreme Leader was tired.

Here, ensconced in the opaque solitude of his quarters, the man was able to drop the imperious, unforgiving mask of the First Order’s dark figurehead.

Most of it, anyway.

He was _always_ Kylo Ren, and would _always_ remain him; to give up that sense of identity - even for a second - would undo all that he had fought for and claimed in the past decade.

That’s what Supreme Leader Kylo Ren told himself, despite knowing that for as much as he had gained in the ensuing years since he avenged himself upon Snoke, so much had been lost, too.

It had all gone wrong with Sheev Palpatine.

The arrogant old codger had tried to reassert himself in the grand scheme of things, to claim Ren’s power, _his_ power, for his own. But Kylo wasted no time in obtaining his grandfather’s wayfinder, using it to find the ancient Emperor’s power base on Exegol.

The lich had tried to divert him with offers of power, of holding the highest office in a _new_ Galactic Empire. He’d even gone as far to tempt him with promises of finding, as he put it, “your _lost_ scavenger girl.”

Unfortunately for Palpatine, this was a button unwisely pushed.

The Supreme Leader had devoted significant resources to finding Rey, once his spies reported that she had gone missing. But whatever mission she had been on for the Resistance had been one of utmost secrecy, with no record of it present in the few databases the First Order had been able to access. The rebels they’d captured in the ensuing months claimed to have no knowledge of her whereabouts - an alibi that held frustratingly-true even under _extensive_ interrogation.

The only clue the First Order had been able to dig up was a final fueling report for the Falcon indicating that, wherever Rey had gone, it had been out as far as the Outer Rim, perhaps even Wild Space or the Unknown Regions. 

In the meantime, Kylo had tried to reforge his connection to Rey, but to no avail. It remained closed, _except_ for one notable exception: An abrupt vision of her pained face hit Ren during a costly skirmish over Batuu. It faded just as quickly, leaving the man with more questions than answers.

As such, the Emperor blithely dangling that hope in front of Ren brought all the latent bitterness at his heretofore _fruitless_ searching right to the fore of the Supreme Leader’s thoughts.

He saw red, and instantly struck the old man down with his blazing lightsaber.

But this, too, had been a mistake.

For in that same moment, Palpatine’s spirit crashed into Ren’s mind with the force of a hurricane, seeking to usurp his very body.

The younger man had held on, just barely, going comatose as his wills matched the Sith’s in a knock-down, drag-out war of the mind.

By the time he awoke, with Palpatine’s soul limping away presumably to find a more-malleable individual, much had changed.

Two years had passed. The First Order, perhaps unsurprisingly, had gone to ruin.

In the absence of their leader, divisions had quickly formed between the seasoned veterans from the last war and the younger hardliners. Generals Pryde and Hux soon cemented those divisions into their own power bases, which eventually led to war between the two over the First Order’s future.

Naturally, Leia and the Resistance immediately took advantage of this, freeing many of the occupied planets and forming a Galactic Coalition to fight back against what then remained of the First Order’s forces. The burgeoning alliance had soon pushed the Order back to its pre-Starkiller borders, slaying Pryde in a protracted battle over Bakura.

But then the Supreme Leader returned, at the head of a great fleet of Star Destroyers equipped with planet-killing weapons. Fear once again ruled the galaxy, as the Coalition dissolved and innumerable star systems re-surrendered to the First Order. 

Still, Ren felt compelled to destroy a few planets, as examples to the rest. 

After Chandrila had been reduced to rocks and debris, Leia herself came forward as a sacrifice, to put an end to all the death that had consumed the galaxy.

The memory of that all-too-final meeting unsettled him even _years_ later.

But it had all been a gambit anyway, to allow the last remaining rebel holdouts to escape into the Deep Core, along hyperspace routes unknown to even Palpatine. The Supreme Leader had _raged_ , destroying even more planets and slaughtering untold _billions_ in his persistently-futile attempts to root out the Resistance.

After the twentieth planet, the First Order _itself_ rebelled. 

Ren, or rather, _Hux_ , had made the mistake of integrating First Order officers and soldiers into the ranks of the hardcore Sith cultists crewing the planet-killing destroyers. The latter group saw their new comrades-in-arms as impure in spirit and body, while the former looked upon _them_ as savages interested only in bringing death, not order. Discontent grew, with an increasing number of First Order soldiers openingly questioning Ren’s leadership. 

Eventually, a _second_ civil war had touched off within Ren’s forces, helped along chiefly by Hux’s very public execution, but also the improbable return of the traitor FN-2187. The ex-trooper had proceeded to sow even _more_ discord within the ranks, and so far had proved nigh-uncatchable, even evading the dreaded Knights of Ren.

To make matters even worse for the beleaguered Supreme Leader, reports were starting to surface of unusual ships matching ancient _Jedi_ designs appearing off the hyperroutes adjacent to the Deep Core. 

The Force itself, so inundated with death and suffering over these last few years, was nearing a confluence of sorts, that much was obvious to Kylo. He’d delved into both Jedi and Sith lore deeply enough to comprehend that the mystical energy field had a tendency of finding balance, no matter how improbable the circumstances.

But an uncomfortable buzzing feeling had been building in the back of Ren’s mind, compounding the stress from the ongoing civil war, the daily executions, and his own growing guilt at it all. He’d tried to relieve it - this was his _third_ set of quarters aboard the Steadfast, after all - but to no avail.

The most he could do was act as he did now; cloak off, reconstructed helmet resting elsewhere, his commanding armchair beneath him. Eyes closed. All perception of the outside world shut off.

A part of him had sneered that this was basically a _Jedi_ meditation, but he silenced the voice. Jedi or not, it gave him respite.

The buzzing was particularly bad today, so Kylo retreated even further into the ritual, the deepest he’d ever been, in fact. The sensation steadily took on a muted quality, before disappearing completely.

The black-haired man sighed in abject relief.

It promptly returned.

He groaned in defeat.

But Kylo noticed that it wasn’t quite the same feeling, not really. It was almost as if the _pitch_ , the _reverberation_ of the thing had changed. It didn’t hurt as much. 

The sensation grew in intensity; Kylo, cautious, tried to push it back down. He was surprised to feel it immediately comply.

Curious, he let his barriers dissolve again, if only slightly. The presence grew bigger.

Resolve steeled his soul. This was something _else_.

But Ren let the sensation grow larger and larger; as it did, he felt not apprehension or panic but a sense of… calm?

He opened his eyes in clear puzzlement, and immediately started in his chair.

The Supreme Leader was not alone.

Before his sight could even focus on the form, he’d pulled his lightsaber to his hand, activating the hissing blade and rolling into a defensive posture.

A posture that immediately softened as he laid his eyes upon... _her_.

Master Rey looked upon him with a mix of pity and warmth.

Kylo, utterly in shock, locked his gaze with hers, partly of a need to _not_ look at the rest of her.

She was as naked as the day she was born. Mostly.

Her brown hair was bound into a long braid, dotted here and there with colorful blooms, that traveled more than half the length of her body.

A memory came to him unbidden, of his last meeting with his mother.

She had worn her hair almost the same way.

Kylo’s face contorted in a rictus of anguish as he collapsed to the cold floor, his saber clattering away, struggling to keep in the sobs that managed to creep out anyway.

It _all_ began to hit him. From the destruction of Luke’s academy to this very moment existed a throughline of _so_ much evil, so _many_ irredeemable acts. Kylo Ren had cruised right past living up to the wicked legacy of his grandfather, and had forged a bloody dynasty of his own. 

There was no turning back, he knew, which made the pain inside even worse.

But he felt a slight, cool pressure at his temples, and gasped as he realized it came from Rey’s airy fingers. She knelt on the deck next to him, brushing his dark locks back with her very _real_ hand.

The sobs halted as his features abruptly changed back to that of surprise. “H… how?!?”

In the finest Jedi tradition, she answered indirectly. “It’s been a long time, Ben.”

The Supreme Leader scoffed through drying tears as he righted himself, awkwardly sitting back against the foot of the chair. “That’s… _that_ can’t ever be my name. Not again, not after…” He choked as emotion came flooding back.

Rey allowed herself the lightest of smirks. “You truly believe that.” A statement, not a question. She hummed in contemplation. “I suppose that’s a problem.” 

Ren steeled himself for the typical Jedi plea of redemption and how he could still come back, etcetera. But Rey surprised him.

“It just seems that you’re not particularly happy with ‘Supreme Leader Kylo Ren’ either.”

The black-haired man ground his teeth together as his inner edifice, time-worn and riddled with cracks, finally shattered.

Damn her bones, she was right.

He stood up and stormed away from his nude visitor. His face twisted in anger, and yelled “Of course I am!” even as his tone said otherwise.

Rey stood too, adopting a look of incredulousness. “Are you?” She caught his gaze again. “Happy? _Truly?_ ”

Though they were standing across the room from each other, the tension was no less thick as Rey and Kylo stared each other down.

But the retort on the Supreme Leader’s lips died as he realized the fruitlessness of arguing the point with somebody who had already exposed it from what it was.

A shroud. 

He turned his head away, unable to look Rey in the eyes as he muttered, “No.”

She watched him as he plopped himself down in the armchair, putting his head in his hands as he tried to escape the reckoning that he had so deeply wrought. 

After a few seconds, he spoke again. “I don’t know what to do.”

Rey’s patient silence prompted even more words to spill out. “All I wanted… was to be more. More than Jedi or Sith, more than what my parents, or Luke, or _Palpatine_ had intended for me. And now…”

 _Here_ was when she cut in. “Now, you’re standing atop a mountain of your own creation, but you’re afraid to look down and take in the view.”

“Because you know what you’ll see.”

Kylo’s breath came out in woeful rags.

Rey silently strode over to him, her bare feet barely marking the polished floor as she went, before coming to stand barely a meter away. “Those lives… _all_ those lives… They will be with you for eternity. Nothing you do will ever change that.” She stoically watched on as Kylo’s fingers tightened around his skull.

“But…” Rey began mustering her strength, gathering all the strands of the Force around her into a tightly-wound sphere of transcendent essence. “There is a way, a way to hea-”

“Don’t even _try_ , Rey,” the black-haired man bit out, his hands lowering to tightly clutch the arms of his chair. “There’s no... redemption for me.”

The Jedi Master smiled, a sad finality evident in her now-distant gaze. 

“This isn’t about redemption.” 

Kylo went still, his eyebrows raised.

“This is about cauterizing a wound.”

Then she pulled on his arm, and they were no longer aboard the Steadfast.


	12. The Dyad, Part Two

Kylo blinked.

This was… some sort of Jedi illusion, a side effect of his and Rey’s bond, a manic hallucination.

But Rey took his gloved hand and led him deeper into the meadow, on this… planet? He looked up as he numbly let the Jedi guide him; the sky, lit by a mid-morning sun, was tinged with a pinkish haze. 

It was a nebula, that much he knew. But  _ if  _ it was a nebula…

The man’s jaw fell open as all the facts flew together like a squadron of TIEs in close formation. 

“This is Ittezna 441-B! The Lonely Planet!”

Still looking ahead down a path only visible to her, Rey nodded. “Yep.”

“You’ve been trapped here for 10 years.”

Again, a distracted nod. “Uh-huh.”

Kylo’s eyes narrowed as he deducted, “And... you’ve just trapped me here, too.”

At  _ this,  _ Rey stopped. She let go of his hand, turned to face him, expression flat.

“Yes.”

The Supreme Leader’s fists balled in anger, his features darkening. He was without his saber, but he was still strong in the Force. He’d  _ make  _ Rey take him back; as much as he despised himself, he couldn’t trust the forces under his command to anyone  _ but  _ himself. He rather die than let some renegade  _ trooper  _ destroy all he’d built-

“You mean, all  _ Palpatine _ built.” Rey corrected.

Kylo’s face went slack, his insides going cold as he realized exactly how much he’d been outplayed. Rey’s words from before rang like a warning bell inside his head.

_ It’s been a long time. _

When she had purposefully invaded his thoughts before, as his captive on Starkiller, it had been a raging fight, with the scavenger just barely managing to bend his own interrogative beam back upon his very thoughts.

Here, she’d done it as casually as one might blow away a thin layer of dust.

Meanwhile, Rey continued to deconstruct his very being. “Kylo, for a  _ very  _ long time, you’ve been a pawn. A tool to be used.”

“Even now. You really don’t believe the Emperor, your mortal enemy, isn’t  _ benefiting  _ from the very ships he built rampaging across the galaxy?”

Before the Supreme Leader could even refute her with a curt “I  _ beat  _ Palpatine,” the Jedi was already confirming his deepest fears. “You didn’t. You held him off, for a time, but the man - if he could even be called one - is patient.”

Kylo had paled to a ghostly white, his lips going dry as a bone. “That feeling I’ve been having. The… buzzing. That’s not just stress.”

Rey shook her head. Again, the pitying smile. “No.”

“He’s drawing on your anguish, your despair at everything you’ve done. Waiting until you’re at your lowest point…”

Kylo drew in a shaky breath. Again, he’d underestimated.

Rey took a step closer. “But I can  _ help  _ you. Help you free yourself.”

Eyes wet with emotion, she held out her hand.

“Like  _ I’ve  _ been freed.”

Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, son of darkness, heir apparent to Lord Vader, stared at the Jedi Master’s open palm.

The irony of the moment was not lost on him.

But he took her hand regardless. 

As he did, the feeling of despondency that had so dominated his thoughts in the past few years... lifted. It was as if Rey had personally taken a vibro-bar to it and pried it away.

But something felt off. She noticed, too.

He almost laughed as he realized. Kylo pulled his hand away, practically tore off his thick black glove.

Their hands, one pale and sweaty, the other tanned and calloused, met again. Both Kylo and Rey dipped their heads as they delighted in that simple, _pure_ feeling of human contact, long-lost to them both. Rey lazily grinned as Kylo’s large fingers half-consciously massaged her knuckles, tracing the lines of her hand.

As he did this, he caught her eyes again… and something must have broken within him, because in the next moment, he had pulled Rey  _ close _ , embracing her. The Jedi felt wet droplets on her back as the large man enveloped her. Resonating from deep within his chest, two words: “I’m sorry.”

More droplets. She could feel Kylo -  _ Ben  _ \- shuddering with renewed guilt.

Rey could only say one thing in response. “I know.”

She parted from him, if only slightly. Looked up at his broad face. Thick, black locks hung in front of it; she brushed them back. Kept her hands anchored to his shoulders. 

He mutely stared at her, all scars and sweat and tears and blushes. 

His lips hung somewhat ajar. Rey filled the void with her own.

Ben was motionless - frankly shocked beyond belief - for a whole second before he responded. Eagerly.

Their lips pressed against each other repeatedly, soon forming a single undulating ribbon of swollen flesh. But just as Rey dared to slip her tongue through the tempestuous cordon, Ben ejected. “No,” he panted out. “I don’t deserve… I don’t deserve  _ this.” _

Rey moved her hands up to his head, lovingly caressing it as she replied, “This isn’t about what you  _ deserve _ , Ben.” Her expression changed to one equal parts resolve and compassion.

“This is about what you  _ need _ .”

She kissed him again, this time a light peck on the lips.

Then Rey took his hand again, and continued leading him to her home. The dark glove remained, discarded upon the ground.

***************

After years living in the wild, Rey had decided that it was time for a change. She returned to where she began on the Lonely Planet, to the great forest that she’d scouted - what felt like - a lifetime ago.

The Force guiding her just as easily as it did then, Rey sought out a tree. Not just  _ any  _ tree, though. It was one she’d seen in a dream, one larger beyond belief. As it turned it out, she hadn’t even needed the eyes of her old friends, the scurriers, to find it; after a day’s search, Rey almost literally bumped into it. 

She’d circled the immense oak, searching for the deeper meaning that her dream implied. It didn’t take long to find it: A naturally-hewn entryway in the side of the trunk. 

Following it, the Jedi’s eyes lit up as she entered a vast, bounteous hollow, the sun shining in from an opening in the ceiling where the trunk divided into two smaller ones. In that instant, she knew she was  _ home _ .

Years later, Ben had a similar reaction, as he entered and took stock of the room. Small animals scampered in-and-out through high up crevices. A small pool, fed by an underground channel, sat serenely in the center of the space. Plants and flowers sprouted up from nearly every corner and wall. One particularly-large and close-to-the-ground frond had clearly been made up into a sort of hammock, with vines stretching and binding it to the woody enclosure. 

It was in this that Rey now lounged, sitting in it sideways with her back propped up against the surprisingly-smooth walls of the trunk. Ben was still so awestruck by it all that he almost fell into the pool as he wandered, stopped only by a sharp “Oi!” from Rey. 

He froze, and blushed, quite embarrassed. Rey comforted him. “You’re lucky, actually. When  _ I  _ came in here the first time, I didn’t have anyone to stop me.” She sighed. “It really is  _ quite  _ a place, isn’t it?” Ben asked her how she found it, and she’d recounted her experiences, adding “I think the ancient Jedi used this place for their mediations. The Force…”

“...feels stronger here. More...  _ alive. _ ” Ben finished, his voice heavy with reverence.

Rey grinned, nodding. She understood what Ben was going through at this moment. He’d spent so long enmeshed in pain and suffering, that to suddenly find himself somewhere so  _ diametrically  _ opposed to all of that… 

The former Supreme Leader blew out a trembling breath, and for the first time in ages, smiled. Unabashedly.

It warmed Rey’s heart to see him so.

He turned to her, eyes full of gratitude. As was his voice. “ _ Thank you _ , Rey…” But his voice trailed off as he took in her reclining form.

Rey’s long braid dangled behind her, letting the sun - almost a spotlight now as it shone through the ceiling -  _ fully  _ exhibit every inch, every contour of her tanned, toned body. She’d unconsciously let her legs spread a bit - and kept them that way as she picked up on Ben’s sudden interest.

She coyly took in his reaction, running a hand over her slim belly and spreading her legs even farther. Ben’s eyes probed the juncture of her thighs, and the thick thatch of hair that adorned it, with an energy of outright  _ hunger _ . He couldn’t help but chew his lip as he felt his pants getting noticeably tighter,  _ just  _ from seeing the slightest hint of pink flesh peeking out from within the deep shadow.

Rey purred as arousal suffused them both. “What would you like to do,  _ Supreme Leader _ ?”

Ben staggered as a sudden feeling of revulsion washed over him. He shook his head. “I’m not…” Purpose gripped his features. “That…  _ title _ , no longer has any meaning to me.”

Rey’s face purposefully went blank. “What do you wish to be called, then?”

The black-haired man pondered; turmoil and conflict arced across his face, his posture, his thoughts. He saw all he currently was, and had done, washed away except for the haunting echo of guilt. 

“Just…” He pouted as he decided, with the utmost finality, “...Ben.”

Rey practically lept from her hammock, but quickly regained her cool as she sidled up to the man. 

Her face and voice spoke nothing but unfiltered joy as she breezily replied, “Ben it is.”

Then she kissed him again. This time, Ben did not stop her when her tongue slid between his teeth.

He failed to suppress a husky moan - one so resounding that Rey  _ cooed  _ in response - as she reached up to caress his broad back, her breasts pressing insistently against him. He, in turn, guided his shaky hands to the small of her back, pausing only to strip the remaining glove off. She felt so… smooth, for somebody who had ostensibly spent a decade in the harsh wild, almost-totally bereft of hygiene.

But this place  _ was  _ different, that much he knew. And he imagined that uniqueness would gain definition as he spent, Ben supposed, more of his life here.

But his window to ponder such thoughts closed rapidly as Rey snaked a hand down to his clothed rear, fingers hastily circumnavigating the skirting of his black tunic. He couldn’t help his instinctive, surprised jump, but smiled though the embarrassment as he met Rey’s lips again… and attempted a grope of his own.

Then  _ Rey  _ broke away slightly, breath hitching, as Ben palpated the well-defined twin globes of her ass. Feeling the short,  _ hot  _ breaths against his neck only emboldened the former ruler, who grasped and  _ pulled  _ even more, spreading her freckled cheeks. Rey, nearing heady incapacitation, practically buried her head into Ben’s chest as he massaged her.

But she caught herself, and slowly pried the man’s hefty hands off her ass. Ben eyed her worryingly, fearful of having gone too far. But Rey eased his worries. “I just… think that one of us may need a little…” Her voice lilted to an amusingly high pitch. “ _...undressing?” _

Ben blinked. 

Then began working at the collar of his tunic like the thing was physically  _ burning _ him.

Rey caught his fingers. “Relax.”

In a single, smooth motion, she fished out the hidden zipper and pulled it down, exposing Ben’s dark undershirt. Pausing a second to bask in the freed body heat, Rey unclasped the heavy belt at the man’s midsection, then pushed it - along with the tunic - to the ground.

The resulting, deep *floof* was barely heard by Rey as she looked upon Ben, hair sweatily tousled, and the neck of his undershirt worn enough to expose his pale collarbone. She crashed into him, tugging at his bottom lip with her teeth. While her mouth was again occupied, her hands continued the job they’d begun, not even bothering to pull the shirt above Ben’s head but instead  _ ripping  _ it down the middle, with the ragged collar as a shatterpoint. 

She’d bet on Ben having no qualms remaining as naked as she was; given how he’d now begun laying thick kisses down Rey’s neck, it was a well-placed one. 

The Jedi delightedly ran her hands over the man’s slick and smooth chest - and frowned as they met the high-waisted pants from all those years ago. Rey hissed out a faux-angry “ _ Still? _ ” to which Ben could only chuckle in kind.

She  _ could  _ have unzipped and discarded them as easily as she did the tunic and belt. But Rey was in a mischievous mood, and Ben was all too willing to oblige her. A devilish smile on her lips, the woman fiercely pulled at the  seam  of the pants. 

An almost comically-loud tear resonated in the cavernous space as the fabric pulled away on that side, exposing Ben’s lower abdomen and pelvis. Rey tugged even more until the ruined pants lay draped over the man’s boots and the floor around them. And then, like one of those predator cats from years before, she merely crouched in wait, hungerly stalking the sight before her. 

The material of Ben’s tight grey undershorts  _ strained  _ against his stiff manhood, barely keeping it from tenting them entirely. Rey looked up for permission, and a blank nod from amid tensed neck muscles and unfocused brown eyes. She idly wondered how long it’d been for him - she doubted he'd had any sexual partners in his former position, but something told her Ben was not one for self-pleasure either.

Her thought was confirmed as she slowly pulled down his shorts past the dark, curly hairs of his crotch, letting his length spring free. She’d barely even laid a finger on it when Ben suddenly gasped, stiffening. Worry plain in her voice, Rey quietly asked, “What is it?” The ex-leader blushed even more, struggling to find the words. “It’s just… I…” But Rey understood immediately, staring at his engorged purple head. “You’re... sensitive down here… is that it?” He curtly nodded, looking downright apologetic.

He started, “I just don’t want to…” but Rey cut him off, eyes watering as her heart warmed. “You could  _ never  _ disappoint me, Ben. Not after today.” Mind working, her gaze wandered to the pond. She smirked. “Fancy a dip?” Ben blinked, then regarded the pool for a few moments. Then,  _ he  _ smirked. “I do.”

He let Rey help him out of the rags of his shirt and pants, then his intimidating black boots and socks. Not a second after the last article of clothing cleared his body had she taken his hand and led him towards the pool. “Now, I should tell you,” she began, “there  _ is  _ a creature that lives within the water.” Ben reflexively tensed, his eyebrows raising to record heights. “But it’s in hibernation right now, and won’t bother us. Otherwise, I’d… have to fill you in a few things.” He discerned the  _ slightest  _ hint of a blush on her cheeks as she said that, but decided not to pry.

As if to reinforce that statement of the creature’s indisposed nature, Rey let go of Ben’s hand and dived right in, disappearing below the formerly-serene surface for a few seconds before arising. She beckoned to the black-haired man. “Come on in, it’s quite nice!” Ben paused only a second, before somewhat-awkwardly lowering himself into the water. Rey couldn’t help but spare a sideways look at the man’s generous length, only slightly flaccid, bobbing as it made contact. 

Ben himself suppressed a shiver as the cool water bore pinpricks upon his skin, and the mud underfoot squished against his soles. Rey studied his reaction. “What do you think?” He digested the sensations assailing him for a handful of moments. “It’s… unique.” After all, he’d never had the opportunity to bathe in a forest pond while with the First Order. 

To that he cooly added three words that stopped Rey in her watery tracks. 

“Just like you.” 

But her placidity shattered within seconds as she took in the corny-as- _ hell  _ compliment-slash-flirt.

Cackling like a Nightsister, all she could do was wade over to Ben - who was blushing madly now - and embrace him while  _ still  _ hitching in laughter.

“Well, well, Ben’s finally turning on the  _ charm _ , took him long enough,” Rey sardonically muttered as she tilted her head up to meet the embarrassed man in a calming kiss. When they broke, she breathed, quietly, “I love you, you know.”

Now it was Ben’s turn to be struck senseless. The very concept of love was one largely unremarked upon in his life before, and so he could never really put a name to the complex feelings, so full of yearning, that arose whenever Rey entered the equation. And yet, she’d just done so for him.

This didn’t make his response any  _ less  _ awkward, though.

“I do.”

A beat.

“Know, I mean.”

Another beat.

“And... I feel the same way.”

Rey, hanging on every cumbersome word, slowly nodded through his announcements. 

Finished, Ben blew out a breath to try to settle his stomach, utterly full of butterflies. Then he looked down to Rey, searching for the slightest hint of acknowledgement.

She flashed a knowing grin, showing off her surprisingly-pearly whites, then stood on her tip-toes to whisper into Ben’s ear.

“ _ Show me. _ ”

Those two vigorous, perhaps even  _ Force-infused  _ words stoked Ben’s flame back to full strength. His flagging manhood rehardened at flank speed, and Rey gasped slightly as it lightly poked against her thigh. She reached down and firmly grasped it, being careful not to excite Ben  _ too  _ much, like before. 

She tried to push out of her mind how her hand  _ barely  _ fit around the thing.

Ben, for his part, handled the touch much better this time, teetering slightly but not completely losing himself in the sensation. He set his hands on Rey’s wet shoulders and kissed her, eagerly, before moving his head - and his mouth - down to the woman’s engorged, dusky nipples. 

He practically  _ smothered  _ them with his tongue, lapping them to peak hardness before teasing slightly with his teeth. Rey arched back, almost losing her balance in the barrage of sensations, but Ben held her steady while continuing his swathing assault. An assault that halted momentarily as the black-haired man suddenly tasted a cloying sweetness on his tongue.

He quickly detached, his brain frantically trying to parse out what was happening. 

Rey was amused.

“There’s something about this place that sends my… hormones, I guess, into overdrive every now and then. Makes me produce milk, makes me  _ really  _ horny too, among other things.”

She looked at Ben longingly, wiping a bit of the stuff off his chin.

“Sometimes I... give into it, sometimes I meditate…”

Ben cut her off with a  _ hard  _ kiss, full of vigor - and her own breast milk if the taste in her mouth was any indication. Her free hand flew down to her clit, the bundle of nerves tingling fiercely at the taboo-ish nature of it all.

She would not be mediating today.

Her lover moved back down to her tits, lightly biting and tugging at them with hungry abandon. She let go of his genitals  _ and  _ her own, unable to focus on even the simplest motion as her screamingly-sensitive nipples began to seep copious amounts of milk into Ben’s mouth and the water around them. The dark-haired man made up for her immobilization, though, cleverly using the Force to churn the water into tiny whirlpools around Rey’s crotch.

One just  _ slightly  _ brushed her clit, and she came.

A keening cry of “ _ Ben! _ ” echoed throughout the hollow. Oddly enough, the other creatures inhabiting it seemed nonplussed by the sudden burst of sound, as if they were used to that  _ specific  _ sort of cacophony.

Rey collapsed into Ben’s embrace, breathing heavily. But before he could even lower his head to cuddle her, the Jedi abruptly straightened. He could tell by her…  _ energized  _ expression alone that she would not be laid low by a single orgasm, no way.

Maybe… seven. Maybe.

Simpering at his thought, Rey pushed him. It wasn’t a brief bump of a step or two. This was  _ propulsion _ . 

Ben rocketed out of the pond, though only a foot or two. His brief fall was cushioned by the thick, reedy grass and the soft mud - and by Rey herself, clearly in control of the situation. She pulled him back in, just a little, by his well-muscled legs; they dangled lazily in the water as Rey positioned herself in-between his thighs.

She cooly took in the sight in front of her, a challenge and prize in equal measure. Ben’s  _ saber  _ stood firm, almost ninety degrees straight, glistening with moisture. But rather than approaching it like a gladiator entering an arena, Rey simply and slowly stepped up, and laid but  _ two  _ fingers on it. She delicately ran them up and down its length, feeling out all the contours, the veins, the odd hair or two.

Rey looked deep into Ben’s brown eyes, searching for signs of discomfort or reticence. All she saw, both there and in his mind… was affection, albeit with the  _ slightest  _ hint of inebriation from her light fiddling. 

She sent an image of what she wished to do over to Ben. He instinctively took in an excited breath, nodding quickly.

The Jedi rose up out of the water, straddling Ben. She took the image of him, glistening from the pond and framed by a half-dozen different kinds of flowers, in with a comportment of long-desired succor. Likewise,  _ he  _ took in the image of  _ her _ , braided hair undone and tossed every which way - yet still an angel lit from high above, in with a similar gratification.

A gratification that  _ surged  _ in intensity as she lowered herself upon him.

Rey let out a heady “Oooh…” as she took in more and more of Ben’s prodigious length. She’d stuffed all sorts of objects, large and small, inside her fun port over the years, but  _ his  _ was a league all its own. The man’s thick mushroom head stretched her canal tight as the rest of his moist shaft rubbed with friction against the fleshy walls.

Both of them moaned at the contact. Their insides pulsated.

Rey could practically feel Ben’s dick, so deeply embedded now, poking at her uterus.

One step at a time, she told herself.

She began to shift and twist, moving up and down upon the great shaft. Ben near-instantaneously picked on the movement, bumping his hips against hers in perfect unison with her gyrations. 

With every buck, time seemed to slow down further and further. Details that had been background noise to Rey and Ben came into sharp focus. 

The light tickling of each other’s damp pubes as Rey effortlessly bore down to the hilt, the lovers’ skin stickly slapping together as she did.

The growing proliferation of the mud and grass below into every fleshy crevice of Ben’s, who, rather than being put off by the sensations, found it akin to becoming  _ one  _ with the world, Rey included.

And, finally: The growing light at the periphery of both the redeemed and his redeemer’s vision.

As the pair freely and happily gave themselves to the building sensation of climax, this light immersed them, filling the hollow, the forest, the  _ continent _ with theirs and the Force’s joy.

Dark creatures across the sector, then the galaxy, hissed in pain at this beacon, visible seemingly  _ everywhere _ . Ghouls and malevolent spirits fled into the darkest corners of reality and non-reality, whatever evil plans they may have had concocted now foiled by this dyad of righteous love.

Others, more pure in soul, looked to the heavens with renewed hope, taking this as a certain sign that the tide was  _ finally  _ turning.

Just as every being  _ everywhere _ had experienced this irrevocable shift in the core paradigm of the universe, the light faded, from blinding brilliance to a happy afterglow.

Though its essence remained, permeating everything, the vision of the light steadily withdrew, back to the planet, the continent, the forest, the hollow.

Back to a sedate, resting pair of lovers, their limbs sleepily intermingled with each other’s and the dozens of spontaneously-grown flower blooms of a dozen different colors.

They awoke in unison, and simply stared at each other, gazes filled with abject tenderness and warmth.

“Rey.”

“Ben.”

A pause.

“There’s mud in my ass.”

She smiled. “Mine too.”

As they disentangled from each other and unhurriedly moved towards the pond, a pair of blue spectres watched from far away, invisible to all but each other.

They, too, smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it.
> 
> Believe it or not, this whole thing was borne of a simple "Rey, stranded, bathes in a pond" prompt; I just developed it out to an insane extent.
> 
> Comments and criticism are welcome, of course. This is my first long-form fic, smut or otherwise.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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